Kaliningrad oblast, a Russian exclave surrounded on all sides by NATO members including Poland, is in a very precarious position. It's why Europeans are always talking about Putler invading and annexing the Baltic states.

I don't think Russia will take military action unless forced to, by a blockade or whatever.

The EU MIC is trying to kick into gear. There has been a push across all media and politicians to cut social spending and increase war spending. Fearmongering constantly is a necessary part of that

This is a huge topic, with a lot of scholarship and debate within the historical academic community. So for China specifically (it's a book about why Song dynasty China, despite having a lot of the preconditions for industrialization, didn't industrialize), probably the best place to start is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. I don't agree with all the conclusions of that monograph but it's a great first foray into the questions and concerns of this kind of longue durée history. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi makes this argument that the Chinese state was strong enough to stop capital from taking over and that the way capitalism formed in the West is actually rather odd; this is a wonderful book but it requires quite a bit of context, and you might even be better off starting with his more broad account of the rise of capitalism called The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, which (despite its name) covers around 500 years from the formation of capitalism in Renaissance Italy up to the modern era. Fernand Braudel's three part Capitalism and Civilisation, from which Arrighi draws a lot of his ideas, is phenomenal but very long and again requires even more familiarity with the historical period.

If you just want a quick summary of all the above, distilled into something quite short but still well done, I'd recommend The Origins of Capitalism and the 'Rise of the West' by Eric Mielants. It's not specifically focused on China, but it does cover the "capitalism requires the state" bit and why capitalism happens in Western Europe and not anywhere else. For some additional counterfactual history of why the West got rich and the East didn't, I recommend ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age by Andre Gunder Frank and Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm (this book in particular is important, since it doesn't cover the larger question of why the West and not China, but it does push back and disprove a lot of Pomeranz's points about coal power).

You can also check out The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood for a specific look at how the capitalism virus spread from England to the rest of the world, but she kind of disagrees with a lot of the historians above. A lot of the argument comes down to how you define capitalism and where it starts. Wood would argue that capitalism doesn't "start" until the agrarian revolution in England, whereas historians like Arrighi and Braudel would place it a bit earlier in the merchant republics of Renaissance Italy and their financialised capital-intensive economies.

EDIT: Missed your last point, basically you need for there to be incentive to do labour saving technological advancement. Steam power already existed in Ancient Greece and Rome, it just wasn't applied to labour saving things because there was no need. If you can accumulate power and capital via slaves and trade, labour is really cheap, and why would you bother?

Also, the Mongols.

The Kievan Rus was geographically unfortunate enough to stand in between the Mongol invasion and the rest of Europe in the 13th century, and the Russian/Eastern Slavic people spent the next four centuries on a stalemate with the descendants of the Mongols (Tatars), became the victims of frequent Tatar raids that went on for centuries, while effectively shielding the European subcontinent from total destruction.

jdpon don, etc

We can handle it here, a few more racists is just another drop in the bucket. good for South Africa to be rid of such filth

maybe he's finally learning the lesson that the colombian fash will call him a communist no matter what he says or does

You killed the man, not the idea

Turkish exports to northern Syria surged to $219 million in January alone, marking a 35.5% year-on-year increase. Cheap Turkish products have now flooded the market and can be seen being bought on the sidewalks at the expense of Syrian goods.

There's also the question of how these goods are being paid for. I doubt the Turks accept Syrian pounds. Syrians must be accumulating Turkish Lira and other foreign currency debt, or there must be some kind of unconditional transfers with Turkey providing Syria with Lira in exchange for "nothing".

Kinda wish there was more to read on what's going on here.

Guarantees a mass fracturing of the jihadist factions and the creation of new ones as the economy deforms into a free-for-all circus, reactionary cartels forming city-state like blocs while more populist rural uprisings bloom as Syrian agriculture is twisted and deflated NAFTA style by Turkish agribusinesses

A bad quarter in Turkey is all it takes for this bullshit to collapse, unless the Saudis and Gulf freaks want to front cash for the entire Syrian economy a la Ukraine-style

I guess that QoL might increase if the new admin handles liberalization correctly since they are not sanctioned anymore afaik. Although the likely scenario is that they're gonna get squeezed out of everything by western corpos like Libya.

May they all die soon.

I know they have technically been saying it for a decade, but the complete alignment of Western liberals around "Al Qaeda is actually good and the sanctions should go now so Syrians can afford buy bread" is one of those things that is just truly black-pilling.

Syria is now tuked by terrorists that were lapdogs of NATO and Zionazis. New outlets are now reffering to the leader as a "former insurgent", whitewashing his terrorist past.