"Persist" is about all you can say about North Korea. Their nominal GDP is $30 billion. There are over 100 companies in the US that have more revenue than this entire country. They managed to turn themselves into a complete train wreck after the Korean War -- they were the industrial powerhouse on the peninsula, and the South Koreans were farmers. But now S. Korea is a powerhouse and N. Korea is a backward mess. Their only export is nuclear blackmail.Sam the Centipede wrote: ↑Wed Mar 29, 2023 8:45 am I have no idea what will happen. But one only has to look at outlier countries like North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. to see that there are very weird societies that persist.
Saudi Arabia and Iran have oil resources, and can survive for a while (depending on how fast SA's Gawar oil field declines), though I don't think Prince MBS's bizarre economic development plans like the 100-mile-long linear city are going to work out well. Dubai is a place that tourists want to visit and expats want to live. The reason Saudia Arabia hasn't collapsed is that (unlike most dictatorships), the Saudi royal family shares the wealth with the population reasonably well, even though they keep a huge portion for themselves. If SA and Iran get into a shooting war, I don't know who I would bet on to win, but I would bet on Iran to win the economic rebuilding race.
Iran is going to undergo some massive upheaval. We see the theocracy, but less than half the population considers itself to be observant Muslims, and that number is dropping. They want to be more Western, or at least more modern, as recent protests are suggesting. If the current government falls and they install some sort of democracy, they could modernize fairly quickly.
Russia was able to shut out the outside world in an agrarian era, but it was barely able to feed its own population for much of that time, relying on grain imports from the west. They not only lacked ag equipment, but couldn't distribute their crops efficiently, as the distances for their (impressive and huge) rail network to eastern cities are too large.Sam the Centipede wrote: ↑Wed Mar 29, 2023 8:45 am Russia could look after itself without the outside world. It is a large and varied country with abundant resources. It could start to move into more high technology areas, albeit greatly hampered by its lack of initial expertise. What it can't do is achieve anything constructive while engaged in a vast and ridiculous war, killing its own population and its economy. And having an oligarch kleoptocracy running the show is not a good starting point for a program of national reconstruction.
Oil money will no longer be available to drive growth (~30% of GDP, IIRC), partly due to Western sanctions and boycotts, but also because the eastern Siberian oil fields that depend on Western technology to keep producing will eventually collapse now that they can't get Western parts or expertise. And the product from those eastern oil fields is mostly delivered to China via pipeline, which weakens their allegedly super-duper alliance that they announced in early 2022, weeks before the Ukraine invasion, since they won't have anything to sell to China.
Today, Russia has neglected most of its basic industries because it was so easy to spend its oil wealth on importing stuff from the West to keep the economy going. So even though Russia has a lot of farmland (offset partly by so-so soil quality and horrendous weather), they can't farm today without Western technology. Climate change will drive changes towards lots of micro-robots to increase farm yields, and Russia won't be able to build their own because they won't have reliable access to high-end chips capable of AI to guide them.
They're capable of making some jet engines, but new materials technology is key to next generation engines, and they won't be able to do 3-D printing or CMC's (ceramic matrix composites). 3-D printing will increasingly come in as a way to keep building parts for legacy machinery, not just airplanes. Again, they won't be players there. Sure, Russia has the biggest stocks of titanium, which are essential to aircraft production, but they only export raw ore; it's all sent to the West for processing into "sponge" and then to other mills for alloying and finishing. They have minimal internal mill capability.
There are indeed many talented individual Russians, as the country had a great tradition of basic science until Putin came to power and devastated the educational system. They have a higher percentage of the population with graduate degrees than most countries. But those people are not working in a system that will allow them to flourish. They have suffered a decades-long brain drain, starting in the late 1970s when they allowed "undesirables" (Jews, Armenians and other groups) to leave... They then discovered that half of their Ph.D.'s took them up on the offer and moved to Israel and the US. They won't soon recover from that.
It's not just lack of Ph.D.'s that will doom Russia. Their overall population was already collapsing and now they're killing off a goodly chunk of their 20-somethings, who would soon be starting families. And what Putin doesn't kill off in mobilizations, alcohol & drug abuse, AIDS and other health crises will -- longevity (especially for males) in all age groups in Russia is among the lowest in Europe and it's still dropping. Despair is deadly.
As if the structural and demographics weren't already fatal, you're right that the kleptocracy is going to make sure they don't survive. Russian history has always been filled by authoritarians. But previous rulers have only been able to use political control to keep the population in line. Putin's genius is that he figured out how to flow cash down to the people that mattered so that they would support him. Everybody can have a piece of the pie, with the only caveat being that you're not allowed to steal more than your boss.
It's hard to imagine what could transform the government to one based on laws and impartial institutions given the degree that this rot has permeated society. I'm not sure that there are prior parallels in modern government that would show how it could be done.
Even if all of the above transformed overnight, there is no way that Russia could maintain even flat GDP growth if it turned inwards. The rate of population decline is simply too great. Russia's population is now slightly less than it was in 1993, after the fall of communism. But the decline is going to accelerate dramatically in the next 10 years as the oldsters age out and there aren't enough workers to drive an industrial economy. Not only will those workers be unable to sustain an industrial economy, but they won't be able to drive enough tax revenue to allow the government to keep all those nuclear warheads operational. The US is just beginning another generation of nuclear recapitalization and it's going to cost a staggering amount (in absolute $, not so much as a % of GDP). Some of that is going to go to new missile systems, but a lot of that is required to deal with the effects of radiation on the components of existing warheads. So over time, Russia's nuclear blackmail leverage will naturally wither.
A fairly common conclusion from the pundit class is that Russia becomes a lot more like North Korea, squandering the natural resources they have as their population dwindles. I think that's true. I'd also suggest that as their population dwindles, they might end up seeing the ethnic regions (with most of the natural resources) east of the Urals agitate for independence, and you'll see China in there helping them. Interestingly, Tom Clancy's long-ago thriller "The Bear and the Dragon" is based on such a scenario.
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and intelligent sucking up to friendly (or not-unfriendly) countries 
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