As the war of words between Guyana 🇬🇾 & Venezuela 🇻🇪 threatens to turn into a very real conflict it is interesting to look at both their respective national & US diaspora populations as the U.S. will likely be the most decisive foreign actor in determining how things turn out. Venezuela has more than 30M people and is thus far more than an order of magnitude larger than Guyana’s tiny ~750,000 people. 400,000 Guyanese live in the US (that’s more than half the number of Guyanese in Guyana!). By contrast 800,000 Venezuelans call the US home. However, diaspora politics may not matter as much as in previous conflicts as most Venezuelans have no love for their government (even if they do think Essequibo is Venezuelan) and thus they will not raise much political pressure stateside. Guyanese OTOH may attempt to exert pressure on the US government to intervene. But this is yet to be seen.

Japan will likely have less than 65 million people by 2100. Even so there is a high likelihood there will still be a Japan. With a unique culture, society & history. In fact if Japan can get TFR back to 1.5 they will be in good shape. More to a country than economic expansion.

👨‍🦳👵 🇬🇧The United Kingdom in much worse demographic shape than the US or Australia. There’s a massive cohort born from 1960-1971 that is starting to enter retirement. The cohort replacing them is much smaller. UK is trying to remedy this with immigration. Canada scenario awaits them.

Between 1963-1983 Thailand had more than 1 million births per year every year. Since then births have plummeted & have been below 600K annually since 2020. Not as bad a demographic situation as Korea or Taiwan but it’s getting there(& Thailand is far less wealthy than either).