Agreed.
Local trade isnt likely to go away even in the worst of the Collapse. Regional trade isnt likely to go away.
Both Japan and India kinda need it. Especially Japan.
Frankly, Cuba has more regional links in places like Nicaragua and Honduras, where it has supplied both doctors and military personnel in the past, and where it will find people willing to work with them in return for skilled personnel and pharmaceuticals.
And those will have people with actual experience with limited resource agriculture.
The Gulf Coast of the US is just unnecessary.
Doesn't mean someone might not do it, because a lot of people seem to be stupid in fiction and IRL, but it plain costs them less to stick to familiar territory.
I'm squinting at it and trying to figure out why they simply wouldnt buy that stuff from Victoria.
But I guess its possible.
1)Modern piracy does not seem to work like old-timey piracy.
The Somalis held hijacked ships and their crew for ransom. In the Gulf of Guinea they kidnap crew members for ransom and leave the ship. In parts of the South China Sea its basically larceny writ large, where they steal shit small enough to be manportable like cellphones and and run away.
Old timey cargos were fungible. You can sell silk and spices untraceably, and gold was gold. You can even fence the ship. Modern cargos are not. Pirates are not able to fence the contents of an international cargo ship. You can't exactly unload containers or handle bulk grain or oil without big port cargo handling equipment, and no big port will willingly take in a hijacked ship flagged by a bigname country for fear of bigtime retaliation.
And if you stumble on stuff like heavy machinery or crude or iron ore, you cant use it.
And noone will buy the ship because its identifiable.
2) Given that the scenario explicitly has Russia driving up the price of gas and squeezing fossil fuel-powered transport vessels, I'm allowed to express skepticism about pirates getting their hands on the fuel to continue to operate motor boats for very long in the Caribbean. Its much harder to practice piracy if you need to use a rowboat/sailboat to catch a cargoship moving at 15-20 knots.
And it's not like the pirates can just walk out and find a ship either.
The Somalis for instance would sometimes have to range far into the Indian Ocean on motherships to identify potential targets before unloading motorboats with pirate parties.
1) For one thing, I'm fairly sure you are way off in your numbers.
Aid to war-torn Yemen in 2019 according to Human Rights Watch was 3.6 billion dollars for 14 million people, which comes out to about 250 million per million people. In comparison, in 2018 Germany spent 23 billion euros on both integrating a million refugees and fighting the root causes of migration; 7.9 billion dollars on keeping more refugees at home, with the remaining 14 billion or so on housing, integration and other costs. Reuters citation
The price of transplanting a couple hundred thousand refugees to the mainland and maintaining them is going to be significantly higher than helping them stay home. A set of tropical Caribbean islands at peace with almost a tenth the population are going to cost much less. I'd be surprised to be spending more than a couple hundred million a year in total for all of them.
2) For another, Europe produces a food surplus. Allegedly even today 20% of European food production ends up in landfills or as animal feed, and thats down from the 1980s. If they are shipping food, most of the cost is in transportation, and sea shipping costs are low. Paying your own farmers and your own workers for stuff youre shipping to EU territory is economic stimulus, not a waste of money.
If they're simply sending over people to help train the locals to improve local production of essentials and moving a shipment of extras every six months or so, the costs drop even more.
Even, say, subsidising a chunk of the French Foreign Legion to squat on French Guiana's launch facilities as security against bandits and vandalism has the benefit of ensuring several thousand very well trained light infantry who would normally be off in parts of Francophone Africa arent sitting in Europe with no employment.
The ex-military mercs who were paid to fight in the Pacific War are something for national security experts to remember.
3) Feeding people of no strategic value is in part a national cohesion thing anyway. The Commonwealth is not the first place to figure out that feeding people who are your citizens or on your claimed territory is a net good for social stability. FDR did it in the middle of the Great Depression. The EU has social welfare programs and had to deal with refugee flows from both North America and the UK.
4)Exasperating? Not intentionally.
But the facts as I see them are fairly unforgiving.
We've been told Alexander did not willingly stop pushing into Europe.
Did not just eat Ukraine and Moldova, Belarus and the Baltics, Romania and Bulgaria, burp and decide he was full. He came back for seconds and thirds until he was physically stopped at the buffet table.
He was stopped in Finland and Poland by people posing a credible enough threat that he backed off, even back when large parts of the EU were in serious turmoil. He failed in the Balkans. He still has a bunch of Hohenzollerns in his backpocket for a claim on Germany.
Is still trying to destabilize France even in the face of a much stronger EU and with China on his other border.
Its hard to square the idea of Alexander as an expansionist authoritarian fascist with his passing up a continent that was both vulnerable to energy supply disruption due to his control of the Middle East and significantly militarily inferior due to lack of access to space infrastructure.
A continent that he has land borders with; where Kaliningrad Oblast has been a major Russian base for decades.
Unless it wasn't militarily inferior. Unless it had access to the force multipliers necessary to make that threat stick.
I mean, for some idea how important this stuff is, India put up its own indigenous GPS constellation starting in 2013 called NavIC after the US denied India GPS access in Kargil in 1999 while they were having clashes with Pakistan. Japan started putting up its own in 2018. And the Soviets/Russians started putting Glonass up in the 1980s, and maintained it even during the rough 1990s. The Chinese put up BeiDou in 2000.
Israel has been putting up recon satellites since 1988. Poland alone has a GDP 4x its size.
Of course, the GM can always wave plot fiat.
This is a quest, not a simulation, and theres only so much fidelity possible . But there are minimal levels of force necessary to deter military adventurism from an expansionist superpower with which you have a land border.
In my opinion.
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