Russian person here and I don’t want to conquer anyone! Don’t get me wrong, it’s kind of neat to hear you and Vassar agreeing with Moldbug about colonialism, but seriously: I don’t see how annexing Tajikistan would help our economy. They’re already sending us all the cheap labor we want :-) This arrangement is better than back when we owned Tajikistan and a host of other now-independent countries, which were all huge money sinks.
(IMO economically it would even make sense for us to let Chechnya go, but we can’t do that because they’d just start the attacks again with money and volunteers flowing in from Arab countries, as it happened in the first two wars.)
Yeah, conquering foreign countries isn’t very good at generating wealth for the conquerors these days. You used to be able to go take an army into a city, round up all the valuables, and sell the population into slavery. Not so much any more.
Russian person here and I don’t want to conquer anyone! Don’t get me wrong, it’s kind of neat to hear you and Vassar agreeing with Moldbug about colonialism, but seriously: I don’t see how annexing Tajikistan would help our economy. They’re already sending us all the cheap labor we want :-) This arrangement is better than back when we owned Tajikistan and a host of other now-independent countries, which were all huge money sinks.
(IMO economically it would even make sense for us to let Chechnya go, but we can’t do that because they’d just start the attacks again with money and volunteers flowing in from Arab countries, as it happened in the first two wars.)
Yeah, conquering foreign countries isn’t very good at generating wealth for the conquerors these days. You used to be able to go take an army into a city, round up all the valuables, and sell the population into slavery. Not so much any more.