Peter Zeihan's 2017 book The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America featured a chapter (6) on Russia called The Twilight War. "The world is changing in ways most of us find incomprehensible. Terrorism spills out of the Middle East into Europe. Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and Japan vie to see who can be most aggressive. Financial breakdown in Asia and Europe guts growth, challenging hard-won political stability. Yet for the Americans, these changes are fantastic. Alone among the world's powers, only the United States is geographically wealthy, demographically robust, and energy secure. That last piece -- American energy security -- is rapidly emerging as the most critical piece of the global picture. The American shale revolution does more than sever the largest of the remaining ties that bind America's fate to the wider world. It re-industrializes the United States, accelerates the global order's breakdown, and triggers a series of wide ranging military conflicts that will shape the next two decades. The common theme? Just as the global economy tips into chaos, just as global energy becomes dangerous, just as the world really needs the Americans to be engaged, the United States will be...absent." The Russian Geography: A Lesson in Pain Russia’s geography, in a word, sucks. Russian lands are barely temperate, with all but one Russian city lying at a higher latitude than Minneapolis. The singular exception is Makhachkala, the capital of the dangerously untidy province of Dagestan. Moscow itself gets under 20 hours of sunlight for the entire month of December. Russia only has one commercially navigable river, the Volga, which is frozen one-third of the year and empties to the landlocked Caspian Sea rather than the ocean. Short growing seasons make full tables something the Russians will never take for granted, while lack of easy movement condemns the country to being capital poor. On the western edge, the Russian plains merge almost seamlessly with the plains of Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, and especially Ukraine. There are no mountains or hills or even rivers separating them from each other. The southern border is even more open. Russia shares a 4,200-mile border with Kazakhstan, most of which is bereft of features more vertical than a Kansas interstate on-ramp. In the southwest there is a “real” border in the Greater Caucasus chain — a mountain range that paved roads breach in but four places, only two of which remain open year-round. But most of the people in the northern slopes of the Greater Caucasus are not actually Russians. Instead the regional populations are a Halloween candy grab bag — complete with hidden razor blades — of conquered peoples ranging from the Kabards to the I ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wbTq66bSpk

Excerpt from workshop at the Hoover Institute... https://youtu.be/zTiHT5NIiGg ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSCkbC-mUc8