"If you can watch only one video to understand current geopolitics, make it this one by George Yeo, one of Singapore's longest-serving cabinet ministers (23 years!)

As Yeo explains, current global geopolitics is fundamentally driven by US "retreat" and "decline", forced by a financial reality that no US administration can reverse: its debt servicing already exceeding its entire defense budget.

To Yeo, this explains why the US insists so much that its "allies" in Europe and Asia spend more of their GDP on defense - to basically pick up the tab for an empire America can no longer afford - but it also means that, inevitably, "once your allies begin to have their own military capabilities, they will think differently, and they will not follow you in everything that you want to do."

As such, American decline becomes self-reinforcing: the more it asks allies to carry their own weight, the less reason they have to follow its lead.

Still, Yeo says that a similar dynamic to one that happened after the fall of Rome could occur where America - like Byzantium did - sheds its empire and consolidates around its own hemisphere, allowing it to remain self-sustaining and powerful for a very long time.

He believes it's the direction things are heading - which would also explain Trump's obsession with Canada and Greenland.

It remains however obviously an open question whether an American "Byzantium strategy" is even achievable: Canada, for one, clearly wants no part of it." (Arnaud Bertrand)'

Full video available here: