This is Vantage Point, the podcast for critical thinkers, where we make sense of and excel in our lives, our jobs, and our world. We're not political, just critical. Thanks for joining in the fourth of our eight inaugural episodes. I'm your host, Ellie Amdur. We've had a few weeks now to think about thinking, especially of the critical kind. And I hope we agree, critical thinking is in danger of becoming extinct. What has happened here? What has become of critical thinking? Vantage Point has one objective and one only to help make you better, more competitive, and more fulfilled by constantly improving your critical thinking. Today, let me take you back more than eight hundred years and then bring you back to the present, all to explore good and perhaps not such good thinking. Let's talk about alliances. Alliances are more important than ever, and they will come up again in this podcast. But for now, you have a decision to make. Resources that proliferate across your expansive lands and numerous ports in central and northern Europe. You have come under increasing pressure over the last thirty years or so from trade competition, new trade routes, the need for new classes of goods, and from hostile forces like pirates and invaders. The year is somewhere around eleven seventy-five. And new worlds and markets still haven't opened up yet because Marco Polo hasn't gotten here yet, let alone Christopher Columbus. And Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, the great expander of the world's knowledge, is still nearly three hundred years away. Your world as you know it isn't global. It's narrowly parochial, but surely becoming regional and increasingly difficult to manage. What do you do? Essentially, your decision comes down to this. Do you go it alone or do you align yourself with other complementary interests, confident that there is a strength in numbers and opportunity in expanding your reach? It's not a difficult choice. I want to talk to you about the rise of the Hanseatic League. In giving thought to the preceding discussion, what you've done, the decision you've made is to join the Hanseatic League, a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns, both coastal and inland, in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a handful of northern German towns in the mid to late twelfth century, the League expanded between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries and ultimately encompassed nearly two hundred settlements across nine modern day countries in Europe. Estonia, Latvia, Russia, Sweden, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. All being done without instant global communication, no less. Ideals were ideals after all. The League, originally a loose association of smaller commercial interests, coalesced to form what became the predominant global trading interest, not only promoting trade, but supplying defense and protection. Hanseatic League traders enjoyed toll privileges, protection in affiliated communities and their trade routes, economic interdependence, and all sorts of alliances between ruling families, otherwise known today as good foreign relations. Ultimately, the League operated under common regulations and codes. And during its heyday, the League dominated trade in the North and Baltic Seas. There was no doubt about its benefits. It's hard to think of anything that hasn't changed in the world since the twelfth century. Until, of course, we think of things like alliances, leagues, treaties, unions, and guilds. Unless polluted by politics or corrupted by personal interests, these organizations were established for and always served the benefits of their members. Well, now, let's fast forward eight hundred years. Leading alliances of the twentieth century include NATO, the United Nations, Benelux, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, still in existence, by the way, but nominally. The European Union, the United Arab Emirates, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was entered into by President Obama and withdrawn by President Trump, and now operating without the US, and BRICS, BRICS. Originally it was BRIC, Four Letters, BRIC, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. It soon added South Africa to make it BRICS. So now let's do some addition. The original four countries have a combined population of three and a quarter billion people, or 41% of the people who inhabit this globe. This is United Nations data. Their combined GDP is $24 trillion, which is 24.7% of the world's output. That's a powerful block, and even larger when we add in the remainder of the now 12 BRICS countries. On the other hand, the combined population of the 31 NATO states is 960 million people, or 11.9% of the world's population, with a combined GDP of $50 trillion, actually 49.8 trillion. This is NATO data, and that comprises 51% of the world's economic output. So 41% of the people in the world, BRICS, are producing 24% of the world's output. That's kind of weak. It's just enormous. On the other hand, in the West, 960 million people, or 11, let's say 12% of the world's population, is producing $50 trillion. And that is much smaller, but much more powerful and much bigger in economic output. Okay. So you see the contrast here. In light of these numbers, first-term President Donald Trump's remarks about abandoning NATO countries who failed to allocate 2% of their GDP to NATO defense seem to miss the whole point of an alliance. Military defense is not the only issue, as the history of the Hanseatic League teaches us. And when the distraction of the US-Iran war dissipates, standing naked will be the only world leader and his sycophants who have the real possibility of taking us back eight hundred years and leaving us there. A remarkably different take on global alliances. So, what have world leaders and world citizens learned from this? What have they learned from the success of the Hanseatic League for a couple of hundred years? And what does that look like in today's world? When Donald Trump first took office and discussed America first, many people were afraid that our allies would not feel so strongly about that and would see a weakening of defense and business and take off in their own direction. And that's exactly what's been doing. Germany, UK, France, Italy, the larger economic and military powers of Europe. Their leaders and their citizens seem to have learned the value of tightening up the alliance, strengthening it, bolstering it. And we have not. Recent actions and speeches by Emmanuel Macron of France and by the leaders of the other great nations, including the smaller great nations, like Netherlands and Belgium, indicate that alliances, as the title of this essay, this verbal essay, indicate are more important than ever. It's a lesson that should have been learned. It's the kind of lesson that if you're involved in good, clear, positive, forward-looking, uh critical thinking, you're going to get it. But we cannot afford to have negative forces take us back 800 years and leave us there. We're going to begin this home stretch with a few of my aphorisms. I've been asked by a couple people, where did I get these? There's no book, no text, nothing. And I haven't quoted anybody. These are, in total, about 368 truths, which I've discovered along the way in my very long business career, which began in the area of education in 1968 and the area of business in 1973. These are my truths. After these, we'll talk about some great thoughts from great minds. Today's aphorism number one: Unattended over time, problems get bigger and opportunities get smaller. There is no exception to that rule. Number two, forever try to be just a little kinder than is necessary. No matter what you're doing, you need to be kinder than is necessary. And number three, overprepare. Preparation is one thing you can't ever have enough of. So, what are the three aphorisms dealing with today? The use of time, kindness, and preparation. As the leader of an organization or a political entity, if you are attentive, kind, and prepared, good lessons as you are leading an organization or a political entity or whatever. When you talk about great minds, you got to talk about Ben Franklin, who probably invented things across as wide a spectrum as Thomas Edison. And we'll visit with him in the weeks to come. We know Ben Franklin as a pamphleteer, poor Richard Solmanac. We know him as a scientist and electricity, probably the single most dynamic change maker from a scientific point of view, ever since Franklin was alive in 1706. Franklin kept his eyes and ears and mind open. I always laugh when people say, why didn't Franklin ever become president of the United States? Well, that was simple. He should have, but he was ahead of us because Franklin died in 1790. And our first president didn't take office until 1797. But he was an ambassador to France. He was someone who developed a tremendous relationship with the great Polish diplomat Kacciusko. And attracted Kosciuszko here to help us develop the beginnings of this nation. We owe Franklin more than we owe just about anyone else. And it's always a good idea to have a copy of the book, Poor Richard's Almanac, in your bookshelf. A little bit later this year, I'll tell you a delightful, delicious story about Franklin, but that's going to come up in September. If you want to be part of this discussion, go to my website, eleamdru.com, and leave a comment. Now it's time to talk about what if. Greatest question that ever was invented. I've spoken about the some of the founding fathers. I've spoken about the European Union. I've been up and down the scale of history. But I'd like to ask you to think this great nation of ours, the United States, in its 250th year, is a great example of what if and what if something had not happened. What if Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were not so dynamically successful in attracting to the United States the Marquis de Lafayette, at the age of twenty-six, by the way. And Thadeus Kosciusko from Poland, an immensely talented, very smart, strategic and tactical thinker. Indeed, it was Kosciusko, who was responsible for the defense of West Point with the famous chain across the Hudson River, which at the time was called the North River, and who added to the discussion about how our constitution would work and how our branches of government would work. What if Franklin and Jefferson had not attracted Kusciusko? You know, Kusciusko left the United States and went back to his native Poland and helped Poland establish the very first constitution on that continent. Now he had great difficulty. And others made the rest of his life until the day he died very difficult. He almost agreed to come back to the United States through Philadelphia, where he originally set foot on these shores, to accept the offer that Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington gave him of 50,000 acres. There's 640 acres in a square mile. No, 50,000 square miles of land covering western Virginia, West Virginia, eastern, and southeastern Ohio. That's how badly they wanted Kosciusko here in the United States. They never got him on a permanent basis, but that they did get all his wisdom, his strategies, his tactics. What if they were not able to do that? We'll talk about it next time, although that discussion runs itself. There's another guy that Franklin and Jefferson and Washington, especially Washington, were instrumental in recruiting to the cause. And that's Thomas Paine, who wrote Common Sense. It is said that were it not for the pen of Thomas Paine, the sword of Washington would have been in vain. What if they were not able to attract this Scottish immigrant to the United States' cause to write common sense? It's estimated that of the three million colonists who lived in the colonies at that time, at the time of the revolution, half of them purchased copies of common sense. Half. Nobody does that. Thomas Paine did. And it's not as if he was clearly in agreement with everybody because he and Jefferson and he and Franklin had their spats. But everybody knew that it was Thomas Paine who made the revolution live through the citizens of the colonies at the time. These are things also that Jefferson and Franklin did. What would have happened if they didn't succeed? We can talk about that more next time. But think about it. So with that, we're going to slide home, but not until I tell you that next week I'm going to talk about another one of my very famous and favorite human beings, Nicolaus Copernicus, one of the original critical thinkers of all time. We're going to talk about writing. Writing and thinking are very closely related. And we're going to talk about writing and continuing to write on a regular basis. I'm going to talk in depth about critical traits for the 21st century. And there happen to be 21 of them. And how it is so important to think of critical thinking not as a skill, but as a trait we all need to develop. That brings us to the end of this episode. Thanks for your time. See you next time. Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep thinking critically.