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What’s going on, Internet, and welcome back to Life’s Biggest Questions, the channel where we ride the waves of fact and fiction to a spectacularly speculative conclusion.
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I’m glad you’ve been digging the latest videos, and if you find this one to your liking, make sure to hit that thumbs up, and share the video with your friends and enemies,
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because it’s important to maintain a balanced information diet.
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My name’s Jack Finch, and today I’ll be your host as we ask the question: What I Mexico Becomes A Super Power?
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Now, we’re not going to lie, as usual, there’s a lot to unpack in this video.
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The majority of which, has some real, tangible possible outcomes that may even be playing out in real time as we speak.
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To approach this question, we first need to understand what it takes to be a superpower.
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The term “Superpower” was first applied after the fallout of World War 2,
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and collectively determined that the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union were the top dogs of the modern era.
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Coined to describe a state that had a dominant economic, technological and cultural position, which was characterised, by its extensive ability to exert influence on a global scale.
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Plus, you know, a huge military.
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Essentially, it’s a Civ five win condition.
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Please don’t nuke me Gandhi.
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After nineteen fifty-six and the Suez Canal Crisis, old Blighty had pretty much lost it’s superpowers and faded quicker than Allan Quartermaine’s will to live.
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Again, after the Cold War and everything that came with that, the Soviet Union dissolved,
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and in nineteen ninety-one, the United States of America remained as the only nation that could maintain the mantle of Superpower.
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But, you know, now there’s China, Germany and… stuff.
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So, let’s imagine this whole time, Mexico, the arguable underdog of North America, had been biding it’s time, laying in wait to reveal to the world its true might.
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An interesting position to be in.
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Mexico has an extensively rich and vibrant culture, and has been populated in some form or another for over thirteen thousand years.
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After being colonized by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, Mexico began walking the path to a federal republic,
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and set out the blueprint to an innovative, independent society under the Mexican Constitution of nineteen seventeen.
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Economically speaking, Mexico has the fifteenth largest nominal GDP in the world, and the eleventh largest by purchasing power.
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They’re up there with Russia, Canada, India and Brazil, and if their young, fresh economy continues to grow at its current rate,
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it wouldn’t be absurd to imagine Mexico rising up as an economic powerhouse.
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Even after the two thousand eight recession, Mexico’s economy grew an average of three point three two percent, per year, between two thousand and ten and two thousand fourteen.
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Mexico’s economic success is mainly down to one thing: oil, and they’re the seventh biggest producer in the world.
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In two thousand nine, a petroleum consultancy giant estimated that a particular field in Mexico had an estimated one hundred and thirty-nine billion barrels of oil in place.
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That’s huge, and if Mexico could tap into that potential, then we’d quickly see them rise up the ranks of the GDP.
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And with a rise in domestic economic dominance comes the potential for trade: NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.
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Mexico constitutes eighty per cent of its exports to the USA, which makes up about a quarter of Mexico’s economy.
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Most of this is made up with automotive manufacturing, and the US has recently shifted its imports away from China, and towards their Southern neighbours.
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Things are looking pretty cushty for Mexico.
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There’s one major problem though, and that’s the world's perception of Mexico, and the image of the country being riddled with drug dealers and criminals.
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But that’s like viewing the US during nineteen twenties in Chicago or Atlantic City, and there’s a bunch of Al Capones and Nucky Johnsons running amok.
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Every country has a severe issue with crime and, unless I'm mistaken, there are currently zero crimeless nations.
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Even countries at a similar GDP to Mexico, like Italy, Spain and even the UK, struggle to deal with a level of organized crime.
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There’s no denying that there are cartels that have an active presence in Mexican society, it's a fact, and they’re pretty damn scary.
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But historically, we can take a look at another superpower who had risen up surrounded by organised crime, Russia.
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After the Bolsheviks and the storming of the Winter Palace in nineteen seventeen, the Russian state began a long relationship with organised crime and communism: Vorovskoy Mir, the Thieves World.
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Even now, Putin’s Russia appears to be an economically prosperous place for politicians and oligarchs alike.
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So who’s to say that Mexico wouldn’t take a similar path?
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Maybe it wouldn’t be a hindrance, but a boon, and give them the economic and cultural boom needed to step out onto the world’s stage.
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And then things would quickly come crashing down, and we’d have one giant problem: two superpowers on the same continent.
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Which, really, is what this whole video has been leading up to, because if Mexico powered up and checked the required boxes needed for super-power-dom,
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the majority of which would come from a dominant economy, then the USA would have a pretty severe problem.
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You see, so far in modern history, there hasn’t yet been two superpowers that have existed on the same continent.
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I mean, technically Britain and Russia brushed shoulders briefly, but that was short lived, and the majority of the modern era saw America and Russia at opposite ends of the see-saw.
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It played out in real time through the Cold War with spies, espionage, missile crises and posturing on either ends of the planet.
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There was an entire other continent between the two, you know, minus Alaska.
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But when you bring it right next door, that'd be imminent war.
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That’s if it even got to that point, without the US engineering a trade war, kind of like what we’re seeing with Trump’s dangerous game with China at the moment.
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More than likely, without some kind of diplomatic union which, let’s face it, is pretty unlikely with the US,
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we’d see a conflict that would likely result in World War three.
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Who knows, maybe Mexico would win, and we’d see the green, red and white flag rolling across the Americas.
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Or, even better, they just skip the war entirely, establish a kick-ass space program, and we can finally colonise our solar system, together , forever.
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Yeah, that sounds much better.
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So there we have it guys, the sort of answer, to What If Mexico Becomes a Super Power.
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You’ve been watching Life’s Biggest Questions, my name’s Jack Finch and remember: there’s no such thing as a stupid question.
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Take it easy!