How Geography Made The US Ridiculously OP

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possible by the Curiosity Stream and the Nebula. Watch another new full video accompanying this one in my ongoing modern conflict series that explains the entire course of the longest war in American history, the 20-year-long American invasion and occupation. Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, along with 16 other full episodes with more than five and a half hours of combined content covering more than a dozen other major conflicts of the 21st century, which you can access by signing up for Curiosity Stream's Nebula package. for less than 15 a year on Curiositystream.com Real Life Story The United States of America is the most powerful empire that has ever existed in human history without even being the largest in terms of overall territory, no other empire has been so able to impose its economic will so thoroughly on the rest of the planet, the United States has continually remained the world's largest economy since the 1890s and is the only country to have ended each decade with a bigger than it was at the beginning for the last 150 years.

The US dollar is the main reserve currency used by most nations in the world. The United States government is the second-longest continuously operating regime in the world, and despite representing only five percent of the contemporary human population, the United States controls about 30 percent of the planet's wealth. and produces 20% of all global manufacturing and complements the tremendous economic power of the United States. It is also its unprecedented military strength. The United States Army alone accounts for nearly 40 percent of all global military spending. The United States represents half of the world's naval fleet. The United States controls more than 750 overseas military bases in every imaginable theater around the world, allowing the United States to attack any threat anywhere on the planet's surface in less time. of 48 hours and while there are many factors that contribute to this unprecedented global power and influence of the United States, the most important reason and the true source from which all American power arises is the fact that

geography

and geology of the North American continent itself are incredibly mastered from the point of view of the construction of civilization; in fact, they are so outrageously overpowered that it's not even really fair to anyone. of other starting points of civilizations on Earth and it was almost inevitable that any civilization that started where the United States did, regardless of its people or ideology, would have eventually emerged as the dominant global superpower, so let me explain in depth why that is the case, to begin with the The central geographical reason for the global power of the United States and the core of the North American continent itself is almost certainly the Mississippi River and the vast basin that surrounds it, wedged between the high Rocky Mountains in the west and The lower Appalachian Mountains in the east, interconnected with the Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Red Arkansas and Missouri rivers, as well as most of the tributary rivers that feed this enormous system that encompasses a third of the entire continent, begin in relatively low elevations, which effectively means that most of the rivers in the basin are calm and unimpeded. as fast and therefore have been easily navigable for thousands of years without the need for any expensive advanced technology development or infrastructure.

The most important thing to understand about the Mississippi River itself is that it is the longest navigable river in the world, which means that since time immemorial Basically, anyone could sail a boat carrying supplies or people from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the Mississippi and more than 000 miles deep into the North American interior before reaching the river's only natural waterfall here, which coincidentally is exactly where the twin cities of Minneapolis are located. and st. pablo was established the navigable section of the mississippi river from these waterfalls to the delta in the gulf of mexico is more than three times the length of the rhine in europe and a third longer than even the second longest river in europe navigable rivers such as The Mississippi or Rhine are tremendously valuable for generating economic activity because they are substantially cheaper to use to transport goods and people than land infrastructure, roads and railroads require not only high initial costs to build but also high ongoing costs of maintenance to maintain them. up and running too, while rivers already exist and are basically free to use, the only costs involve creating ports and ships to transport things up and down and as a result, shipping goods by water instead of land costs between 10 to 30 times less expensive in the modern era of the 21st century and civilizations that have more navigable rivers will be able to retain substantially greater amounts of profits from all the capital they will save on transportation costs.

This fact instantly makes the Mississippi River the world's longest navigable river tremendously economically valuable to anyone who controls it. Farms and factories built along or near the 3,000 kilometers of its shores between the delta and the Gulf of Mexico and the waterfalls of Minneapolis and St. Paul are able to export their products at low prices. further downstream and out into the world ocean toward global markets, but the Mississippi River itself is only the main channel of the broader overall network of navigable rivers found throughout the Greater Mississippi Basin that ensures such settlements. deep in the interior of North America such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and Chicago. sioux city st louis memphis muskogee shreveport and more effectively become ocean ports, all capable of exporting their various products at low prices along the mississippi river network to the gulf of mexico, but it is not just this vast unique system of navigable rivers internally within North America what gives this continent such an advantage for trade is also the fact that around much of North America there is another very unique geographic feature that cannot be found anywhere else in North America. a pattern as useful as the many barrier islands that exist in an almost continuous and unbroken chain. along more than 3,000 miles around three-quarters of the United States Gulf and East Coasts, from the southern tip of Texas, where the Rio Grande flows into the Gulf, to Chesapeake Bay, which is home to to washington dc and baltimore, in effect, these innumerable low, flat islands have transformed what would otherwise be 3,000 miles of exposed coastline into a network of sheltered and sheltered bays that can be effectively used as a kind of oceanic river relatively navigable from Brownsville , Texas, to Baltimore, Maryland, and since the Mississippi River Delta empties. directly to this additional navigable network, means that goods have been able to be transported economically, reliably, and quickly from throughout the interior of North America to the entire Gulf and East Coasts for hundreds of years, when collectively added the internal rivers of the The Mississippi Basin and this outer Intracoastal waterway surrounding the Gulf and Eastern shores represent nearly 25,000 kilometers of navigable waterways combined, which is not only more than the rest of North America combined, but more than the rest of all the combined planet.

The end result is the largest natural transportation system found anywhere in the world, a massive network of free-access river superhighways that puts 90 percent of the lower 48 continental United States within just 150 miles of each other. an easily navigable waterway and everything was just effectively provided to the united states more than two centuries ago back in 1803 when the French decided to sell everything for about 340 million dollars in today's currency value and then the power that this The natural navigation system offered to the United States is further exacerbated when one considers that it extends across what also happens to be the largest contiguous stretch of arable agricultural land on the planet, as well as the American Midwest, the most The western part of the Midwest located within the rain shadow cast by the continent's towering Rocky Mountains is dry but temperate and perfect for growing wheat like Ukraine and southern Russia, while the central part is temperate and humid, perfect for growing corn. and soybeans.

Today, an area more than twice the size of France is located in the Midwest alone and, as a result, this region produces almost a third of the planet's total corn and soybean supply and more than $150 billion in agricultural products in total per year and all this huge agricultural land also roughly overlaps with the largest network of easily navigable rivers in the world, it is a perfect natural recipe for the development of an agricultural superpower from and further considering the fact that the network of intracoastal waterways further meets the transportation needs of everything from texas to maryland, the colombian snake rivers flow through the agricultural areas of the pacific northwest, and the san francisco bay and sacramento river aid within the central valley of california, you can quickly see that, with very few exceptions, the vast majority of all agricultural regions in the united states are located just 150 miles from a waterway to the ocean that allows food grown in rural areas to from the continent to be transported easily and cheaply to the urban population centers of the same continent in a way that simply no other continent on earth could match and we are still at the beginning of explaining the magnitude of North America's geographical advantages towards maritime transport. power and commerce because there are also the many natural indentations of the continental coastline that create many of the world's largest natural deep-water ocean ports.

For a natural harbor to be a good harbor, it really must have three crucial factors. Ingredients: Deep passages to send enough resources into the immediate hinterland to support cities that can support the port and a large amount of waterfront when only considering the natural harbors around the world that possess the three critical factors, the three largest being all within continental north america and controlled by the united states the chesapeake bay between maryland and virginia the san francisco bay surrounded by california and the puget sound of washington state these three are possibly the most impressive natural harbors found in the earth's surface while The Chesapeake Bay alone has a coastline longer than all of India combined.

When added together, the entire coastline of the modern United States is more than three and a half times the length of the entire African continent, even though Africa itself is more than three times larger than the united states in terms of total territory, This means that the United States coast in the Atlantic Gulf and Pacific has a greater overall potential for ports than any other country in the world without exception and can even fit significantly more ports than other continents are capable of and then there is Also the fact that with a bit of modern civil engineering the United States acquired a second huge internal waterway in the mid 20th century, the Great Lakes, due to the fact that the Great Lakes are naturally filled with rapids like Niagara Falls. and the fact that the connections between the lakes often freeze during the winter were never naturally navigable on their own throughout history until the late 1950s, when a series of locks and canals were completed.

By Americans and Canadians the Great Lakes now serve as an internal water transportation system complementary to the Mississippi Basin and the Intracoastal Waterway allowing even more cities deep within the continent to effectively become ocean ports from Duluth to Detroit to cleveland and buffalo and then there is the fact that through a series of artificial canals the Mississippi Basin system and the Great Lakes system are now connected to each other and the barges can effectively navigate freely with their loads in a giant circle around the entire eastern United States, but as large as the Mississippi basin is, it contains a couple of critical geographic vulnerabilities that can be exploited by America's enemies, and both essentially revolve around New Orleans, the strategically most important of all the united states because it serves as a gateway between the entire super highway network of the mississippi river and the intracoastal waterway and gulf of mexico, if new orleans ever fell into enemy hands or was destroyed in any way, the link between the largest river transport network in the world and theglobal ocean would lock up and the entire system, along with the US economy, would effectively collapse and there are theoretically two possibly easier ways to achieve this, other than capturing or destroying New Orleans itself, the first being to seize Cuba.

Cuba is probably the most strategically valuable piece of the North American board that the United States does not directly control or have significant influence over. This is due to the way the island juts into the Gulf of Mexico creating two straits that all ships going to and from. They come through the gulf and the great world ocean have no choice but to pass through the Straits of Florida in the north. or the Yucatan Strait in the south, on its own, Cuba is too small an island to take advantage of its strategic position to threaten the trade of the underbelly of the United States between New Orleans, the Mississippi Basin, the Intracoastal Waterway and the outside world, but when placed under its dominion. of a major power from another continent, it can be absolutely as it almost happened in the early 1960s, when the Soviet Union began placing nuclear missiles and troops there, Cuba can hypothetically be used as a springboard to attack the United States.The advantage most significant geographic location in the United States, and as a result, Washington has been actively enforcing the longest trade embargo in modern history against the island for more than 60 years, now desperately hoping to bend its people to its will and prevent any hostile foreign great power ever being too established there, the other incredible weakness is, almost paradoxically, the Mississippi River itself, which has desperately wanted to change its course for decades, for thousands of years.

Now the Mississippi River has always meandered for long periods of time and its delta has shifted through several positions along the Louisiana Gulf Coast back in the 1970s, the river would have naturally changed its course from its current course beginning in a place that almost no one would have heard of: the small city of Vidalia Louisiana from here the Mississippi would have begun to flow towards what is currently known as the Achafalaya River to a new delta in the Gulf about 120 kilometers to the southwest of present-day new orleans, if this had been allowed naturally, the entire mississippi river would have been completely diverted around the cities of baton rouge and new orleans, leaving their river infrastructure stranded and their people without any source of fresh water and creating of a new delta for the river in an area that is currently essentially the middle of nowhere, the end result would have been an economic catastrophe for the United States of unprecedented proportions and So, in anticipation, the US Army Corps of Engineers The United States built what is probably its proudest achievement: the two-billion-dollar former river control structure within the small city of Vidalia, artificially forcing the Mississippi River to involuntarily continue its historic path toward Baton Rouge. and New Orleans. where all the infrastructure built over centuries is actually located, but if this structure ever failed somehow in the future, the mighty Mississippi would almost immediately and violently take courses to flood the Atchafalaya into the Gulf, instead of flooding everything in its path and effectively destroy the utility. of all US agricultural and industrial processing infrastructure between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and temporarily closing most of the Mississippi Basin superhighway system until new infrastructure can be built in the new delta, although these weaknesses are Essentially just hypotheticals, the fact is that the land where the United States is located is the most suitable place in the entire world for a civilization to become a colossally capable maritime empire for all the reasons I have already explained and for many. more, for example, there is also the fact that for centuries Now the United States has been able to develop within this continental-sized landmass without fear of regional rivals developing either to the north or south in Canada or Mexico, in largely because the

geography

of both the southern and northern regions cannot support an empire nearly as powerful or as populous as the land in the middle that is currently controlled by the United States after the United States invaded, conquered, and annexed the half of Mexico back in the 1840s, the largely mountainous lands left to Mexico did not contain even a single naturally navigable river within the interior in a single good natural harbor on the coast of Veracruz, furthermore, the areas The agricultural areas that Mexico had left behind were relegated within the many valleys that crisscross the mountains, leading them to be highly separated from all other agricultural areas of the country, which is completely opposite to the hugely interconnected agricultural geography further north.

In the United States and then in Canada, the vastness of the Canadian Shield, a cold region where glaciation over eons of time has stripped the area of ​​most of its usable soil, making it useless for agriculture, is It stretches across half the country, between the Great Lakes and the Arctic Ocean, and separates the small agriculturally productive core of Canadian civilization around Toronto and Montreal from the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia to the west, without no internal base. navigable rivers between them to rely on, like much of the united states, to this day there is only one highway connecting these four provinces west of the Canadian shield with the core of Canadian civilization east of the shield and this means that inevitably the four canadian provinces west of the shield are significantly more economically integrated with the united states to the south than with the rest of canada to the east because it is much easier to travel to the south and access the united states' vastly superior transportation network, Therefore, as fate would make it the heartland region of North America's incredible productivity and easy transportation, it is also one of the safest places of its kind anywhere on the planet, far removed from potential rivals. or significant threats, and this, in essence, is the secret sauce of the United States. enormous geopolitical force, incredibly easy transportation within the core combined with incredibly difficult transportation beyond it, not only is it not easy for rivals to develop within North America that threaten the core, but two enormous oceans separate the core from all other continents and, in essence, transform the United States into an island empire but on a continental scale.

The oceans are incredibly difficult for invading armies to cross. In 1940, with the domination of continental Europe, Adolf Hitler had to cancel the invasion of England to through the English Channel because it was proving too logistically difficult for the Nazi war machine to start up and that channel is only 33 kilometers wide at the narrowest point, the shortest distance between the United States and Europe is It is almost 5,000 kilometers across the open ocean and is even further from Asia across the vast, empty Pacific, so as a result, the core United States has never been invaded by a hostile foreign power in more than two centuries since the British in 1815 because it is largely impossible to do so, especially considering that the United States also controls half of the naval tonnage of all the countries in the world. navies and dominates the entirety of the world's oceans and even if somehow a foreign power were able to miraculously surpass the largest, most capable and most technologically advanced navy in human history and then transport and supply hundreds of thousands to millions of troops across thousands of miles of open sea and land them on the beaches of North America, it wouldn't even really matter because the North American continent has essentially all the resources necessary for modern civilization and modern armies located deep of the.

This is the other great key to power. of the modern United States' raw geological potential for many decades, the specter of overdependence on other nations and other continents for its energy resources loomed over the minds of the United States' most strategic planners, even though they once It was the largest producer and exporter of oil in the world. throughout the early 20th century and provided nearly six out of seven of all barrels of oil used by the Allies in World War II. The United States' days as a major oil-producing nation were believed to be ending in the mid-1970s, when demand quickly outstripped production in the post-World War II economic boom of 1973, with the country Importing more than a third of its total oil supply from abroad, the United States suddenly became especially vulnerable to international oil embargoes from OPEC, the organization of oil-exporting countries

made

up of countries around the world. middle east africa and venezuela at that time the opec countries accounted for half of all oil production in the world and their decision to embargo the united states due to its support for israel during the yom kippur war excluded them from that half of the world supply and caused American energy prices to skyrocket.

Later, after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the United States was cut off from that country's entire rich oil supply and, as demand for oil within of the United States continued to increase throughout the 20th century. and since domestic production was never able to catch up, the United States found itself in a position where in 2005 the country imported a whopping 60% of its oil supply from abroad, an amount percentage-wise very similar to what China imports today. , as a consequence of US foreign imports. For decades in the late 20th century, politics was dominated and limited by this heavy dependence on the outside world for its oil supply, but in the early 21st century a revolution in the oil and gas industry at home would permanently change this reality with Profound Consequences and Consequences Still Unknown Technological and economic innovations in the drilling technologies and techniques now known as fracking were finally unlocking the ability of oil and gas companies to economically crack the hydrocarbon code of shale rock, which had remained elusive for more than a century before, starting in Texas recently.

In 1998, within a region known as Barnette around Dallas Fort Worth, news that shale rock could be economically mined for oil and gas began to spread rapidly like wildfire. These new shale discoveries revealed that Texas possessed many of the largest known oil and gas fields in the world. in the world like the eagle ford in the south which became the fifth largest known oil field just behind the huge bergen field in kuwait and an area located in the permian basin of west texas known as the strawberry and wolf camp which It is now considered the second largest oil field in the world remaining only behind the powerful Gavar field that forms the backbone of Saudi Arabia's oil.

In the span of just a decade, this new reality and these enormous discoveries skyrocketed Texas oil production to make the state a major oil producer. that all the OPEC countries in addition to Saudi Arabia itself and today only Texas produces 45 of all the national oil production of the United States and if it were an independent country Texas would be the fourth largest oil producer in the world behind only from the rest of the United States Saudi Arabia and Russia and of course it is not only Texas that produces a ton of oil and gas now for the United States there was also the shale field in the backend field of North Dakota this suddenly transformed that isolated central state in the second largest oil producer in the United States only behind In Texas, there are also the vast oil and gas fields on the Gulf of Mexico coast, the northern slope of Alaska and what, ultimately, could become the largest natural gas field ever discovered anywhere in the world, the massive Marcellus field, a mile or two below. the terrain stretching across upstate new york, pennsylvania, ohio and west virginia, said these new discoveries tripled the estimated u.s. natural gas reserves between 2002 and 2019 and with a massive network built of New gas pipelines stretching across the border into Mexico accompanied by a series of liquefied natural gas or LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast, Maryland and Alaska, the United States was transformedsuddenly out of nowhere into the second largest exporter of natural gas, behind only the russians, and in 2018, what had previously been unimaginable in the days between 1970 and 2005, the united states had once again surpassed, for the first time in more than four decades, to Saudi Arabia and Russia to regain their title as the world's number one oil producer, a position that the United States will now almost certainly maintain for the entire foreseeable future and perhaps most importantly the vast The United States' shale basins are located in the interior of the continent and close to major water-navigable transportation routes, and the network of refineries and oil and gas pipelines of the United States is simultaneously so vast, stretching across almost the entire continent and effectively this has largely turned the United States into an empire that is for the most part capable of true energy independence that is no longer dependent on the complicated geopolitics of the outside world for the supplies needed to power modern civilization for economic reasons.

The United States continues to import large quantities of oil from abroad, but mainly from the North American continent that it dominates so completely. Canada and Mexico alone supply about 60 percent of all imported oil used in the United States today. No coalition's oil embargoes can any longer. from nations outside North America threaten American energy supplies, and neither can a naval blockade of U.S. energy imports that come primarily from other parts of the continent's interior. These geographic and geological strengths add up to make the United States the most formidable world power of the 21st century and human history, but that does not mean that the country is completely immune to external attacks and without weaknesses.

Although the United States is now largely energy independent in terms of oil and gas, the country continues to maintain an extremely strong presence throughout the oil and gas-rich Middle East, not because it is directly dependent on oil and gas. gas from there for themselves, but because the resources of the Middle East are absolutely central to the overall global economy and vital to many of the United States. major allied states in east asia any disruption to the flow of oil and gas out of the middle east through the strait of hormuz would be incredibly destructive to the world economy, a world economy with which the united states has found itself increasingly integrated and interconnected today Up to 30% of all modern US GDP and nearly 40 million American jobs come from this interconnected network of trade with the rest of the world, meaning that, to a large extent, the United States They continue to depend on the rest of the world. and especially the regionThat is why in 1991, decades before the shale revolution, the United States rushed to destroy Saddam Hussein's army after it led Iraq to invade and conquer neighboring Kuwait by taking control of Kuwait.

Saddam found himself personally controlling more than 20 percent of the world's known oil supply at the time, after mobilizing his army on the borders of Saudi Arabia, immediately afterward it seemed clear that he would invade that country as well and take control of its country. oil fields that catapulted him into possession of 45 of the world's known oil reserves, which would have effectively made Saddam Hussein the master of the price and supply of oil on the entire planet. Unwilling to tolerate this threat to the global economy, the United States mobilized the largest coalition of nations. something not seen since World War II and went to war against his army, liberating Kuwait and pushing Iraqi forces across the border, but in doing so, the United States committed to basing large numbers of troops in Saudi Arabia, near the front line, and they didn't.

The exit after the conclusion of the war, combined with US financial support for the Saudi regime, the harsh economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the end of the war, and strong US support for Israel, all of these events contributed to Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization attacked the United States directly in the deadliest attack ever perpetrated against the heartland of the United States on September 11, 2001. In response, the United States launched the War on Terrorism and subsequently invaded Afghanistan. landlocked mountainous area where the local Taliban regime was sheltering bin laden and Al Qaeda and thus began what would eventually become the longest war in American history, lasting the next 20 grueling and ultimately Ultimately, after more than two decades of fighting that cost more than two trillion dollars and more than 140,000 lives nationwide.

The United States finally decided to withdraw almost exactly a year ago, back in August 2021, culminating in a definitive Taliban resurgence that swept the country and catapulted them back to power once again, much like what happened with Vietnam decades before. , the war in landlocked, mountainous Afghanistan ultimately became a decisive foreign policy defeat for the United States and explicitly showed that even the most powerful empire in human history has its limitations, as the war in Afghanistan spanned more In our own lifetime and that of many other Americans and Afghans, this conflict is perhaps the most critical and important of all wars of the 21st century for us to understand. both countries how and why it started, why it lasted so long and what lessons we can learn from it. within the United States, Afghanistan and the rest of the world, but unfortunately, if I were to make an in-depth video about the war in Afghanistan here on YouTube, the many disturbing, violent and controversial details of the discussion of a very recent and horrific conflict would cause the video would be demonetized and age restricted, which I completely understand and think is appropriate, but ultimately it means that YouTube's algorithm would never promote the video for you and there is simply no way for you to see it here and that's why I created another complete companion video for this one in my ongoing modern conflict series it is about the same length as this video which covers the entire course and explanation of the US war in Afghanistan from the beginning in 2001 to the end in 2021 and I uploaded it directly to nebula, which as I'm sure you've probably already heard is home to tons of exclusive ad-free content, like my complete series on modern conflict with 16 other full-length videos containing over five and a half hours of bonus content combined what can you see. and watch it right now covering over a dozen recent major wars and conflicts that will help you stay up to date on what's happening in our world and why from this video covering all the events leading up to Russia's recent decision to invade Ukraine for this one covers the ongoing Chinese genocide of the Uighurs in Xinjiang this one covers the Russian invasion of georgia in 2008 and many more of course the reason all of these videos are only available on nebula is because they would never work here on youtube . and could never be seen due to the way this site works in relation to highly controversial and sensitive recent events.

On the other hand, nebula is a totally different platform without an algorithm and without ads, it is just a platform about great and unique content. made by excellent, independent educational creators with many other exclusive projects exclusive to other creators you probably already know, such as the incredible real engineering World War II era Battle of Britain and D-Day logistics series and documentaries several hours and more in length from Wendover Productions. The best way to get access to Nebula and all of this amazing exclusive content is absolutely through Curiosity Stream's amazing Nebula package and at its current asking price, it's less than 15 a year to get full access to both sites and Curiosity Stream has some advantages. incredible things that you are definitely going to enjoy, like Afghanistan 1979, a one-hour documentary that covers the entire history of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s, and that explains in depth everything the general information you need to know before.

Watching my video on Nebula covering the invasion and occupation of the United States just over a decade after the Soviets left, I really can't recommend it enough and I really don't know of a better offering that exists anywhere when it comes to streaming . You get two streaming sites, both with content. In fact, you'll see it and all for less than fifteen dollars a year at the current retail price, but what's even more, signing up will help countless independent educational creators beyond the real-life story, so be sure to do it now yourself by clicking this button. that's here on your screen right now and it will take you directly to curiositystream.comreallifelore to sign up in real life or by following the link below in the description and as always, thank you so much for watching.