Macromegas #57 - World Race to Resources Control
World Race to Resources Control
Hello Friends,
And happy Friday!
A few weeks ago, I had a discussing about the next global conflict with a friend as a follow-up to this graph found on Twitter:
The chosen metrics are a bit random, but the idea of the post was to compare this to US vs. China.
My hypothesis is that, whether we are facing WW3 or Cold War 2, superpowers will aim to stack the odds in their favour by:
grabbing as much control over natural resources as possible - the key ones being oil & gas & coal, cereals, iron & copper, rare earth & silicon, uranium, and microchips (not natural I know…)
getting as much control over maritime routes/chokepoints as possible
As a refresher before the cool, exclusive data, I already wrote on both these point quite extensively, and all of them are still as relevant today as they were a couple years ago, if not more:
1. grabbing control over natural resources
2. control on maritime routes/chokepoints
Now, I had the exact same thought about World War II back when Russia invaded Ukraine, since nazi Germany fought for Eastern Europe territories mostly to maintain their access to key steel alloy metals such as molybdenum, nickel, manganese, chromium and tungsten; and German military industry collapsed when they finally lost control over these territories. Similarly, one of Japan’s first move had been to invade South East Asia to secure their access to oil and rubber.
I did the analysis at the time, but never published it.
So, as an exclusive chart built from data manually extracted from League of Nations annual reports PDF scans… this is the share of 1939 production capacity between Allies, Axis, and “disputed”:
I think the data speaks for itself.
My friend then smartly went straight into second-order thinking, and highlighted that he could test my hypothesis by checking the overlap between the location of recent conflicts/tensions and that of resource-rich/strategic “non-aligned” territories.
This is what the bingo card heatmap looks like:
I clearly spent way too much time on it, but again I think the data speaks for itself - what do you think?
Thanks for reading, and have a resourceful weekend ahead,
Val