You think it started in Kabul. Pull up a log. In 468 Rome lost half its fleet to boats with nobody aboard, and the empire had eight years of life left in it.
The Fall of Rome Began at Cape Bon. America’s Began in the Strait of Hormuz.
Fool’s Gold: How Modern Nations Forgot a 6,000-Year Lesson
There is a metal that has outlasted every empire that ever touched it. The Sumerians buried it with their dead. The Spanish murdered a civilization to possess it. And in 2016, Canada — a G7 nation of serious people making serious decisions — sold its last bar and walked away with zero. What they left on the table wasn't just $125 billion. It was six thousand years of hard-won wisdom.
Notes Beyond the Map 