Why the Netherlands is Europe’s Most OP Country

The Netherlands is a small country in the northwest corner of Europe than most people these days associate with urban planning YouTubers and amazing bicycling infrastructure but at first glance this country may still appear rather unassuming it's only a little larger than the US state of Maryland is but with a population of nearly 18 million people all contained within it the Netherlands is among the most densely Populated countries anywhere in the world today the country's density of people is about On a par with India and when excluding small city states the country is the densest population

of people people in Europe behind only Malta which itself is only a tiny Island state nonetheless 18 million people is still a rather small population at a global scale and it's only enough to make the Netherlands the 69th largest country in terms of people well of Course in terms of land the country is even smaller and ranks down at only 131st Place worldwide but despite not having a lot of land and not having a lot of people the Netherlands punches far far above its weight in global importance and I'm going to argue here that the

Netherlands is by far the most overpowered country relative to its size in Europe today take the country's exports for example somehow despite being among the World's smaller countries in terms of land and people the Netherlands is among the absolute biggest countries in the world in terms of how much stuff they export out to the global market in terms of value of goods and services the Netherlands is currently the fifth largest exporter in the entire world pumping out way more goods and services toward the global market than dozens of other countries many times it size are

capable of like India the UK or Italy And when you dig deeper into what kinds of goods and services the Dutch are exporting it still gets even more interesting it probably shouldn't be a surprise to most people that the United States of America is the most dominant agricultural superpower in the world the country has the second highest amount of total arable land in the World Behind only India while the United States even further completely controls the largest continuous stretch of Farmland located Anywhere in the world too the Mississippi River Basin with a population only a

fraction of India the United States is capable of producing far more food than it actually needs for itself and so it's no surprise then that the United States is the largest exporter of agricultural products in the world but if you had to guess which country is the second largest exporter of agricultural Goods in the world your mind might wander around other huge Countries with extensive Farmland like Russia Ukraine France China or even Brazil very few people would immediately know that despite only having 5% of the population is the United States and despite the United States

possessing a whopping 234 times more land the little Netherlands is actually the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world and is somehow able to pump out more than 2third of all The agricultural Goods to the World Market than America does once again beating out countries that are way bigger than it like Brazil Germany and China in the process in terms of global trade the little Netherlands is truly one of the world's great powers and that brings with it some majorly outsized economic power despite only being the 131st largest country in terms of land

and only the 69th largest country in terms of people the Netherlands is the 17th largest country in terms of economic size controlling an annual GDP that is larger than turkeys despite having only 1th of the population perhaps even more impressively the Dutch economy is presently more than half the size of Russia's the biggest country in the world that spr RS across EUR Asia and it has more than eight times as many people as the Netherlands does so how did the Netherlands manage to pull off this massively outsized influence on the World stage what is it

about this country that makes it the most overpowered in Europe and why is its influence so frequently overlooked today when it really shouldn't be to begin with it's important to clarify how the geography of the Netherlands directly lends to the country's ability to project trade power and always has the country occupies this perfect positioned spot that's almost dead in the center of Europe roughly equidistant from Spain And Portugal in the west and from Russia in the East this position has always made the Netherlands a natural stopover point for trade between Russia and Scandinavia in the

East and Spain and Portugal in the west an advantage that is only massively Amplified by the fact that many of Europe's mightiest Rivers empty out directly at this location as well the Ry Muse Shelt and M Rivers all empty out in the North Sea through the Netherlands and are all highly navigable For most of their lanks granting easy commercial access to the Dutch Coast deep into the hinderland of Germany Switzerland and France they can be traversed by cheap and easy to use river barges this has made the Netherlands ideally position for Commerce and trade for

centuries but it's also a double-edged sword because the river is emptying out here essentially means that the entire country is basically a giant River delta that's almost surrounded by Water and the Dutch relationship with water virtually defines this entire country the waters simultaneously present a major threat and a major opportunity to the Netherlands on the one hand the very name of the Netherlands translating roughly into English as the lowlands gives a hint towards how much of a danger the water can pose roughly 26% of the country's land mass today is beneath sea level and about

half of the country Is beneath 1 m in elevation the country is notoriously flat and low line and the highest point in the entire country is located in the extreme South far away from the ocean and only stands at 322 M High which is basically just a big hill this is why when it comes to average elevation the Netherlands is the seventh lowest country in the entire world and by far the lowest country in Europe and even that's not really very fair because most of the countries that are lower Than the Netherlands are tiny Pacific

island States and none of them are anywhere near to being as geographically large so you have all of this super low-lying land directly adjacent to the North Sea and all of these huge rivers that empty out into the country that basically make the Netherlands the gutter of Europe which all combine to make the Netherlands among the most catastrophically flood prone countries in the world even today more than one in Five people in the Netherlands lives in an area that's beneath sea level or about 3.7 million people to many countries around the world their biggest national

security threat is their immediate neighbors Ukraine and Finland prepare for attacks from Russia Israel prepares for attacks coming from all around them India prepares for attacks from Pakistan and South Korea from North Korea and so on in a sense the Netherlands is no different today but Rather than any of their borders on land it is their border with the sea that is the biggest threat and rather than any attacks from human beings it is attacks from the ocean itself that poses the greatest national security threat to the Dutch people for centuries the people who have

lived here have fought tirelessly to push the ocean back and keep the water out from their lands the evidence of which is littered all across the country today in the form of Windmills that pumped water out of s and farmland canals that took the water out to the Sea and dkes that prevented more water from gushing in more than 700 years ago back in the 14th century the Netherlands looked a lot more like this with significant amounts of the country we know today being buried Beneath the Sea even the location of modern-day skiffle airport the

busiest airport in the Netherlands and the third busiest airport in Europe was underwater back Then but over the many centuries since that time generation after generation of people in the Netherland lands have spent their lives steadily pushing the water back with the aformentioned windmills canals and dkes to the point where by the start of the 20th century the Dutch had reclaimed roughly 1, 285,000 acres worth of land from the sea and by draining Lakes but the Dutch didn't always want to push the water out of their country all the time sometimes They wanted to let

it in as well since the Netherlands is a small but densely populated country that's about as flat as a pancake the Dutch have never really had many natural geographic features to protect themselves against outside Invaders coming from France or Germany but in the 17th century they realized that deliberately flooding their own low-lying lands in a controlled manner could serve the same defensive role that mountains do for other countries and so Their Geographic weakness of being susceptible to flooding could be cleverly transformed into a geographic strength too over a period of 200 years from the 17th

to 19th centuries the Dutch tirelessly constructed the water line a series of water-based defenses that could be deliberately flooded in the event of an invasion to protect Amsterdam by nearly transforming the Holland region into an island later on between 1880 and 1920 the Dutch Constructed an even more extensive system of water-based defenses completely encircling Amsterdam that they called the Amsterdam defense line the line formed a huge ring around the city of Amsterdam that could be deliberately flooded to a shallow depth of about 30 cm or 12 in deep enough to be a geographic hindrance to

infantry and Cavalry but shallow enough to prevent an enemy from using boats across it unfortunately for the Dutch however The creation of the Amsterdam defense line roughly coincided with the invention of the airplane in the tank and so by the time that Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940 the Amsterdam defense line was already obsolete nonetheless over the centuries from 1300 to 1900 where the Dutch reclaimed nearly 1.3 million acres of land from the sea and lakes in the country they also lost another 1.4 million acres of land area to the zider Z a shallow bay

of the North Sea that was only about 4 to 5 m deep that existed in the northwest of the country just to the east of Amsterdam there had long been discussions within the Netherlands to drain the Zer Z and reclaim huge amounts of the land within it for human settlement for centuries but the technological ability for them to actually do that was lacking up until around the late 19th century it was then in 1891 that a man named cornelis Ley Actually drafted up a feasible plan to drain out the Zer z a plan that would

become the basis for the later Zer Z works that would completely and radically transform the geography of the Netherlands forever in 1916 a violent storm sent a surge of water from the North Sea into the Zer Z that overwhelmed several diyes around it and caused widescale flooding which provided the impetus for the Dutch government to officially begin carrying out cornelis Le's Grand Vision for taming the Zer Z he had come up with 25 years previously the first step of the Plan called for the construction of a huge Dam across the northern section of the Zer

here running between the Dutch provinces of North Holland and frand the dam would be 32 km or 20 mi long and would come to be called the offs slau Dyke or the closure Dyke in English as its name suggests the offs slau Dyke was built to isolate the saltwater Zer Z from any access to the Salty ocean in the North Sea and it took the Dutch years of effort to construct it between 1927 and 1932 after it was completed the dam was designed to include a series of slooh gates that enabled the Dutch to begin

draining saltwater out of The Zo Z while fresh water would continue flowing into the sea from the river isil over time this meant that the Zer Z was transformed from a salty Outlet of the North Sea into a brand new freshwater lake that The Dutch renamed the isomir or the iso Lake and even further the upsl slau Dyke also serves as a cway enabling Dutch travelers to drive their vehicles directly from North Holland to frand without having to travel all the way around the Zer Z like they used to now the original plan of the

Zer Z Works was that after the sea was enclosed by the off slau Dy and tamed huge tracks of new land would be built within the new isomir called poers which are Essentially chunks of an area within the lake that the Dutch would Dam off from the rest of the lake with dkes after which the water enclosed by the dyes would all get pumped out to reveal fresh dry virgin land suitable for colonization the first of these poers within the isil mirre that the Dutch constructed was this one here called the vamir that was fully

drain of Water by 1930 an early proving Concept in test bet that would influence the ideas and Techniques used in all of the subsequent poer construction going forward Vin Jamir opened up about 307 square kilm of extra land to the Netherlands that was incorporated within the North Holland Province and more than 12,000 people live there today a few years later work on the second poer named the nordos poer began in 1936 and was eventually fully drained out and ready for settlement by 1942 and then after the conclusion of the second world war work finally began

On the single largest land reclamation projects of the entire Zer Z works in the south of the isomir originally intended to be a single massive poer work on dredging up faland finally began in 1950 but several changes were made to the original plan as they went about it the development of the previous nordos poer had left the new lower-lying land in the poer directly connected to the older and higher elevated Mainland which led to groundwater from the higher Mainland seeping into the new lower land which led to the ground in the mainland to start sinking

and causing all kinds of problems the original plan for the flavon poer was to leave it connected to the mainland as well but after observing the problems with the nordos poer the Dutch decided to change the design of flavorland into two separate halves an Eastern flavorland poer and a southern flavorland poer with a narrow Southern channel of water separating both of them From the mainland unlike the two poers that came before it fland was both geographically large enough and close enough to the major city of Amsterdam the Dutch planners knew it had the potential to

host major cities on it after it was finished being dredged up as a result after Eastern flavorland was finished being created in 1957 and after Southern flavorland was finished up a decade later in 1968 they became the site of the biggest planned cities on The new poers like Almira strategically and conveniently located only about 20 km away from the bustling City Center of Amsterdam the Netherlands biggest city alira is therefore the most recently settled City in the Netherlands that was only established in 1975 and it's also probably to my knowledge the largest city in all

of Europe that was only settled in the 20th century the very first house in Almira was only finished in 1976 and fast forward roughly half a century later to today and Almira has ballooned to a population of about 215,000 residents making it the largest city to be established on any of the new Dutch poers and the eighth largest city in the Netherlands Nationwide and by 2030 alira plans to construct enough housing to boost their city population up to 350,000 residents which by that point could make Almira the fifth largest city In the country by 1986

the Netherlands did something that no other country in Europe had done in the 20th century they declared a brand new Province out of their freshly created land they had conquered from the sea dubbed The fland Province and encompasses all of the newly created land in the Nord o poer and the Southern and Eastern fland poers representing a total amount of land that's larger than Hong Kong that was conquered not through brute military Force at the expense of others others but through Decades of brilliant and forward-looking Engineering for the benefit of the state the creation of

the fland province from nothing has dramatically assisted the housing crisis in the densely populated Netherlands too as of 2023 about 445,000 people live within fland on land that didn't even exist only a few decades ago as is symbolized by the province's official Anthem called where we make cities arise Today roughly 20% of all the land in the Netherlands has been reclaimed from the sea at some point or another over the past 700 years representing an area of land that is larger than nearby Luxembourg that has been conquered by Dutch Engineers rather than by Dutch soldiers

and the country still isn't finished yet with reclaiming even more land from the sea either you see the original plan for the Zer Z Works called for another fifth poer to be constructed Here in the southwest of the isil mirror it was going to be called the marker Ward poer with a narrow Canal between it and the southern flavorland poer leading directly to Amsterdam so that Amsterdam would maintain its Maritime access to the rest of the lake the markard fer had it ever been built was planned to add another 410 Square km of colonizable land

to the country's territory about equivalent to the Hawaiian island of Leni in scale between 1963 in 1975 the Dutch slowly constructed what many believed was the prerequisite step for this fifth poer a large 28 kilm long Dyer Dam across the isir that split the lake into two that became known as the hoo Dyer after its completion The Hoot rib Dyke divided the isomir into two separate distinct Lakes which led to the lake to the west of The Hoot rib Dyke becoming known as the marir lake and the rest of the isomir staying named as the

isomir The Hoot rib dke also provided a Direct Overland connection for vehicles to take between flavorland and the northern part of North Holland and after its completion the marker Ward poer was originally intended to be developed out of the marir lake but then for decades none of that ever ended up happening on the one hand those in favor of push on with a marker Ward poer argued that it would open up new agricultural land create new housing and open up the possibility of building a brand new Airport close by to Amsterdam to relieve congestion at

skiffle airport but on the other hand those in favor of keeping the marir as a lake argued that in the case of a drought the Lake's water would be useful for a drinking water supply and that during heavy weather events the lake would serve as a valuable buffer zone protecting Amsterdam and alira from the Wrath of the sea concerns over the marker Ward's Financial viability begin to emerge in the 1980s as the debate Continued on and the project was eventually indefinitely suspended in 1986 and then completely canceled all together later on in 2003 but the

discussions on dredging up land within the marir Never Fully went away and they got officially revived somewhat in 2012 when a new project was proposed to build out a series of smaller artificial islands behind the hoot Dyke within the area that was originally proposed for the much larger Marker Ward poer unlike the originally proposed marker Ward these smaller Islands aren't intended to be inhabited by humans but are meant to serve as a wildlife refuge and tourism destination instead the first of the islands was dredged up as virgin land in 2016 and several more Islands have

been built out since then as the newest land in the Netherlands and in Europe but the conquest of these new lands from the sea is not the only thing that the Dutch Have accomplished in their centuries long war with the sea because they've also fought tirelessly to keep the sea out from everything that they've spent Generations building flooding has been a constant concern in this country since time immemorial and in 1953 the country suffered an extremely devastating one a powerful storm gathered in the North Sea and sent a huge surge of water smashing against the

Southward coast of the Netherlands in between the Zealand Province in roddam the levies and dyes in the area were overwhelmed and breached in dozens of locations sending the storm surge through and flooding nearly 1,400 Square km of land in the country the resulting destruction was utterly catastrophic more than 1,800 people in the Netherlands were killed by the waters Fury while 9% of the country's Farmland was inundated with seawater and 10,000 buildings were destroyed the disaster produced so much Grief and shock in the nation that the entire country collectively vowed that such a thing should never

be possible in the future again and so begin the impetus for another decades long macroengineering project in the country that became known as the delta Works while the Zer Z Works were primarily offensive in nature conquering new land from the sea the Delta Works were designed to be more defensive in nature and would ultimately prove to be Effectively the Dutch version of China's Great Wall in 1958 the Dutch government pledged to spend a whopping 20% of its total national GDP on the project that would be spread out over the next 25 years for about the

next three decades after that the Dutch Society built out a massive series of dams dikes levies sloes locks and storm surge barriers all across the provinces of Zealand and South Holland that were most severely affected by the 1953 flood the aim of Which was to effectively reduce the length of the Dutch Coastline and reduce the number of dkes that had to be raised in order to better defend this part of the country from the Wrath of the North Sea there were many incredibly impressive Feats of engineering that the Dutch pulled off during the Delta Works

project but a few of the most impressive include the osta sheld de carrying translated into England as the Eastern sheld storm surge barrier that was Constructed over the course of a decade between 1976 and 1986 this single Giga project is the largest single storm surge barrier ever constructed by humanity and it basically serves as a gigantic gate that protects the inner part of the Netherland Zealand Province from the North Sea its slle Gates normally remain open to allow water to freely travel between both sides but in the event of a dangerous storm surge emerging in

the North Sea the slle gates Can be slam slamed shut and the osta sheld de carrying transforms into a protective shield to keep the water out one of the other greatest marvels of engineering that the Dutch created in the overall Delta Works project was right here at the artificial mouth of the Ryan River only about a 30-minute Drive West of downtown roddam the second largest city in the Netherlands and home to the country's biggest Port roddam is a city that is particularly vulnerable To flooding naturally because about 90% of the city's area Lies Beneath SE

level and it's located directly adjacent to the Rind and very close by to the North Sea thus between 1991 and 1997 the Dutch constructed a massive storm surge barrier right at the mouth of the river that they called the mus slant carine the structure consists of two gargantuan arms each roughly the size of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and each about twice as heavy making the structure the largest Moving object that Humanity has ever created when water levels in the North Sea are detected to be high enough to cause a storm surge through the river

towards roddom the musl currying gates can be given the order to close in a process that takes 2 and 1/2 hours to complete after which the enormous water pressure in the North Sea gets transferred from the wall of the gates to the two largest ball joints in the entire world implanted on the river's Banks each one having a diameter of 10 m and a weight of 680 tons an advanced computer system can automatically close and open the gates based on the water levels on either side and it along with the rest of the other massive

projects in the overall Delta Works program were designed to protect the Netherlands from even a once in 10,000 year intensity storm It's a Small Wonder then that the Delta Works defensive program and the Zer Z Works offensive program together Were named as one of the seven wonders of the modern world by the American Society of civil engineers in 1994 and all of this extensive experience at fighting against the ocean like nobody else has over decades and Cent CES have made the Dutch the foremost Global experts in protecting themselves from rising sea levels in the global

ocean a problem that will only continue getting worse for billions of people all around the world in the 21st Century AS Global Climate Change continues to increase the ocean sea level this has ended up perfectly positioning the Dutch to be the global leaders at climate change adaptation for coastal cities and communities everywhere in the world and Dutch Consultants already travel all around the world to other Coastal communities threatened by sea level rise like New York Miami New Orleans Jakarta and the entirety of Bangladesh offering up their Expertise and knowledge and bringing back more money and

wealth to the Dutch economy in the process the entire Nationwide system in the Netherlands of dikes dams pumps and sloes is so impressive that without any of them a 2007 era study from Calvin university in the United States found that 65% of the Netherlands would be completely underwater during high tide as the famous saying about the Netherlands goes God may have created the Earth but the Dutch created the Netherlands no other country in the world has been as meticulously over engineered and created by its people over Generations than the Netherlands has been and that long

history of cooperation and Collective effort against the sea has produced a unique culture in the country that prioritizes trust collaboration Collective good and efficiency over everything else attributes that spill out into the rest of the country in Sometimes surprising ways from the intelligent designs of Dutch cities and infrastructure to prioritize human beings over cars to the shepherding of skiffle airport strategic location in the center of Europe to become the third busiest airport on the continent behind only Charles de gal near Paris and London Heathrow but another major Geographic advantage to power especially to trade power

that the Netherlands has always Had is their incredibly lucky possession of the port of roddam today the port of roddam sprawls out across a huge area that's larger than the island of Manhattan in New York with four fully automated terminals that accept vessels around the clock at all times of the day every day of the year the water depth within the port is deep enough to handle even the largest of container ships that have ever been built its central location is almost dead in the center Between Western and Eastern Europe and the connections that stretch

out from the port to the European market are just completely unmatched anywhere else from roddom navigable Rivers like the Rind The Muse and the Shelt extend deep into the Hinterlands of Germany Belgium France and Switzerland and since 1992 when the Ry main danu Canal was completed and opened the navigable parts of the Maine and the danu rivers are also accessible which has opened up the Hinder lands of Austria Slovakia Hungary Croatia Serbia Romania Bulgaria and Ukraine all to Inland shipping connected to roddam as well cheap to operate river barges from all of these countries can

easily travel through this network of rivers directly to roddom and transfer their cargos onto massive oceangoing container ships for export anywhere in the world while they can also receive Imports through the same system from anywhere else as well but it's the Netherlands itself that has by far the densest network of inland waterways in Europe the country is home to 2,200 km worth of navigable internal waterways that are used for commercial shipping and that account for 40% of all the international Freight movement within the country and 20% of the country's domestic Freight travel with roughly 6,000

ships sailing through its various rivers and channels the Dutch inland waterways account for a staggering Nearly 80% of all the vessels that sail Inland within the entire European continent enabling the Dutch to move around cargo much more efficiently and cheaply than any other country in Europe is even remotely capable of and it's not just water-based Transportation that's so easy from roddam either the port acts as a hub of several different transportation systems that radiate out from it including Railways and highways the bet routa for example is a double Track Freight Railway line that runs directly

from roddam to Germany where it links up with Germany's oberhausen Aram Railway which extends all the way down to the northern reaches of the rure valley Germany's industrial Heartland the rural metropolitan area is the largest urban conglomeration in Germany and the second largest in the entire European Union with a population of around 11.3 million people and an annual GDP on its own of $580 billion in 2021 Which would make the RAR Valley all on its own the world's 25th largest economy if it was independent and all of the goods it produces can be easily transported

by Railway River barge or truck directly to roddom for export out to the global market railroads emanating from roddam can move Goods as far away as breast Marseilles Berlin and Augsburg in under 8 hours and most of the continent can be reached by rail in under 24 hours the port operates Thousands of direct connections around the world by sea Rail and truck and it's essentially the most convenient and easy to access port for around 500 million consumers throughout the European continent it's no wonder then that for a very long time the port of roddom was

the busiest and largest port in the entire world all the way up until the year 2004 when it was finally overtaken in annual cargo tonnage by the port of Singapore since then ROM's business has Been overtaken by several additional ports in China but roddom continues to remain by far far the busiest port in Europe and the busiest port in the world located anywhere outside of East Asia its importance to Europe from a commercial perspective is so enormous that it still handles more cargo tonnage than the next two busiest ports on the continent combined nearby anwp

and Far Away Nova RIS the port of anwp in Belgium benefits from much of the same Geographic and infrastructure advantages as roddam does and taken together they handle about as much cargo as the next seven busiest ports in Europe do all combined spanning across Russia Germany Spain Romania France and Poland the port also contains five major oil refineries owned by giants like shell and Coke industries that enable the Netherlands to be a major Hub of the global oil industry as well as of 2022 the Netherlands has become the sixth largest Importer of crude oil in

the world that they bring in from just about everywhere but they transform so much of that crude oil at their refineries in roddam into finished end products like gasoline that they become one of the top three Global exporters of refined petroleum products placing themselves just narrowly behind the likes of India and the United States in the process what's really astonishing about this is that the Netherlands manages to export more refined petroleum Products than even traditionally thought of oil superpowers do like Russia the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia simply because the Dutch possess roddom and

control the vital refineries there that can actually transform crude oil into usable end products and because they control the start of the pipeline Network that radiates out from roddom towards Belgium France in the industrial rur region in Germany they can quickly carry petrochemical products to exactly Where they're needed and the reason why this extensive pipeline Network exists in the first place is because it also just so happened then in addition to sitting at top of the Ryan Muse Shel River delta with all of its unique Geographic advantages the little Netherlands also sat directly at top

of the largest natural gas field that would ever be discovered on the European continent as well right here the Giant grenan Gas field this is another part of The story of the Netherlands ridiculous op status that is critical to understand the groning gas field was only discovered by the Dutch in 1959 but it radically transformed the Netherlands forever afterwards the field is actually the 10th largest natural gas field ever discovered globally and it was Central to the transformation of the Netherlands into Europe's Most substantial natural gas supplier pipelines were built out that radiated out from

the field that Connected the entire country and eventually a good deal of Europe to its gas supplies while the revenues and taxes earned on the fields production were Central to the development of not only the Dutch welfare state but to everything else that the country did from the land reclamation projects and the Zyer Z works and the protective engineering of the Delta works over the whole period of Dutch natural gas production between 1959 and 2018 from Groen again and various other smaller Fields dotted all across the country a total of 417 billion EUR equivalent of

cash were earned with at least 85% of that amount being captured by the Dutch state which greatly funded the country's ability to actually develop itself with the Zer Z and Delta Works the gron andin gas field was eventually agreed to be phased out of production in 2014 and as of 2023 it is largely seedall production with its Huge contribution to the Dutch economy over the decades sealed now because of its C location and Myriad connections all throughout Europe the port of roddam is also a major so-called re-exporting of goods as well making it a huge

Hub of goods sold into the Euro Zone area from outside countries like the UK the US and China as an example one5 of all the fresh fruit and vegetables that get imported into Europe from somewhere else come Through via the Netherlands alone and the port of Rotterdam alone accounts for more than 8% of the entire Netherlands GDP now it shouldn't come as a surprise to you then that the enormous advantages of controlling roddam and most of the Ryan Muse River delta have enabled the Dutch to be a major trading power for centuries now across the

17th century the Dutch enjoyed their golden age when they basically invented capitalism established a near complete Monopoly on Segments of the global spice trade and carved out one of the most influential and globally spanning trade Empires that the world has ever seen they brought enormous wealth flowing back to roddam Amsterdam and the rest of the country with the creation of that trade Empire became a territorial Empire for the Netherlands as well that once spanned all across the globe from Indonesia to India to South Africa and the Americas and while this territorial overseas Empire gradually crumbled

and fell apart especially in the 20th century during the era of decolonization the global Dutch trading empire never actually really went away alongside it far to the contrary the Dutch largely kept their global trade Empire generally intact butress by their continued control of roddam and their endless drive to to expand the port's connections to the rest of the continent and to protect the port from the fury of the sea the Netherlands is therefore still the fifth largest exporter of goods and services by value in the world with even more exports pumped out to the global

market than even countries like India the UK or Italy are capable of and with a volume of exports that are close to approaching Japan a maritime Nation with more than seven times the Dutch population interestingly of all the top 10 countries in the world by exports all of them are generally regarded to be modern Great powers of the 21st century except for the Netherlands and Singapore which each just punch way way above their weights in this category and it's not just the exports of refined petroleum products that the country excels at either as I mentioned

at the start of this video the Netherlands have somehow recently emerged as the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world as well managing to export more than 2third of the agricultural products By value as the United States does with only 5% of the same population and 234 times less land despite being located only around 1,600 km from the Arctic Circle the Netherlands has managed to earn the title of the world's second largest exporter of tomatoes behind only Mexico well the country is the absolute largest exporter of other major agricultural products like potatoes and

onions ornamental plants like tulips have long been associated with the Netherlands but they were only introduced to the country by the Ottomans in the 16th century and since that time the Dutch have come to absolutely dominate the Tulips production a whopping 90% of the global production of tulips takes place in the Netherlands these days and 80% of the world's tulip exports all come from here alone giving the Dutch a practical Monopoly on the tulip's production even in the 21st century the start of the Netherlands incredible rise to dominance in global Agricultural and food production is

often said to have begun in the desperation of the second world war when over the winter of 1944 to 45 the Netherlands became the most recent western country to suffer from a debilitating famine in which as many as 22,000 Dutch people lost their lives in the aftermath of the war and the ravages of the famine the Dutch realized that with very limited available land in Their water logged and densely populated rainy country they would have to become the masters of efficiency in the agricultural business in order to ensure a reliable food supply just as they

had to become the masters of efficiency at protecting their country from the w water huge Investments were made by the Dutch government into farming subsidies and Rural infrastructure development to stimulate the country's agricultural sector and then nearly two decades ago The country gave itself a challenge to produce twice as much food using only half as many resources and since that time the country has dramatically expanded the scope and scale of its technological innovations in farming to Far Far exceed that original goal today the Netherlands has some 24,000 Acres of crops growing within artificial green houses

an area more than twice as large as the island of Manhattan in New York and these green houses are just absurdly Efficient the temperatures and climates within them can be precisely controlled by Farmers LED lights can give the plants precisely how much light they need destructive pest can be easily kept out of them eliminating the need for chemical pesticides the plants within can be watered with precisely the correct amounts of water so they don't get too little or too much and in many of them even the carbon dioxide side that gets generated by burning natural

Gas to keep the power going in them is simply piped directly back into the green houses by Massive ventilators where it just gets converted into Oxygen by the plants achieving 99% efficiency in the process the result is that Within These hyper efficient green houses the Dutch can grow fruits and vegetables year round around the clock with bigger yields than anywhere else in the world a single acre of land put beneath a greenhouse in the Netherlands is capable Of growing the same yield of produce that would normally take 10 acres of traditional dirt farming to accomplish

with significantly fewer resources to boot the average amount of water that it takes a Dutch farmer to grow one pound of tomatoes is only a half gallon while the average worldwide is about 28 gallons 56 times more water than what Dutch farmers use the epicenter of the Dutch Greenhouse farming movement is in the Westland region of the country Directly to the west of the huge part of roddom here you will find an most endless landscape of glass green houses from above where 80% of the Region's agricultural land is all contained within one this hyper efficient

farming region alone contributes roughly half of all the Horticultural production in the entire country and its location directly next door to the port of roddam enables its products to immediately travel all around the world to markets Everywhere the Netherlands is also home to an enormous amount of research and development in the agricultural industry as well the country hosts the incredibly prestigious vagan ningan University and Research Center in the middle of the country that is widely regarded to be the global leader in agricultural science and research and it basically forms the nucleus of the entire country's

agricultural sector various Agricultural Science companies in the Netherlands spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on research and development which results in hundreds of new varieties of vegetables and seeds that are coming out of the country on an annual basis seeds themselves are another huge business in the country with the Netherlands now dominating more than a third of the global trade in vegetable seeds because the Dutch are damn good at producing extremely valuable seeds since they spend so much Money on seed research and development one Dutch agricultural company called reiches Von managed to develop a

tomato seed that costs less than 50s but which is capable of producing an astounding 150 lb worth of tomatoes so valuable are the high yield in weather and pest resistant seeds that Dutch companies like Reich Von produce that they are literally more valuable than gold since 1 kogam of gold currently as of this video's production costs around $78,000 while 1 kgam of Dutch engineered tomato seeds can easily go for over $100,000 and this is all how today the little Netherlands has managed to find itself in the position of growing 6% of all the food produced

in Europe on only 1% of the continent's actual farmland and how the Dutch have managed to become the second largest agricultural exporter in the World Behind only the United States an agriculture is hardly the only modern industry that the Dutch have Managed to capture and nearly monopolize parts of an industry that's even more lucrative both from a financial and geopolitical standpoint has been the country's unique cornering of a key component in the global semiconductor and microchip industry that could ultimately make the Netherlands the king maker in who between the United States and China ends up

winning winning the 21st century if you asked a random person where the capital of the global Tech industry is located many would probably respond with San Francisco and Silicon Valley with its host of tech companies present others might suggest Seattle where Microsoft and Amazon are headquartered while Others May insist on Taiwan where the bulk of global semiconductor manufacturing takes place at but very few would argue that another Contender for the capital of global big Tech is here in a small suburb of the Netherlands fifth biggest city called Veldhoven a fairly small town with only 45,000

residents that you've probably never even heard of until right now but veldhoven is extremely important despite its small size because it is the headquarters of a company that you may also have never heard of called asml an acronym for advanced semiconductor materials lithography as it stands currently asml is the third most valuable Company by market cap anywhere in Europe and it is by far Europe's Most Valuable tech company with a total Market Happ in early July of 2024 that exceeded $420 billion equivalent to more than 1third of the entire Netherlands GDP the company's tremendous success

is also only a fairly recent Phenomenon with their market cap having roughly quintupled over just the past 5 years since 2019 the reason why asml has exploded onto the world scene these past few years is because they're literally the Only company in the world that builds the tools that that are required to produce the most advanced semiconductors and computer chips that go into pretty much everything from smartphones to guided missiles to artificial intelligence a 21st century Dutch trade Monopoly that's probably even more influential and powerful than the Dutch Monopoly over the spice trade during their

golden age was in the 17th century you see asml was founded 40 years ago Back in 1984 as an unlikely to succeed joint venture between the Dutch electronics giant Phillips and another company called ASM International which built semiconductor equipment the new company asml planed to produce machines that specialized in a process known as photolithography which itself has history that goes back decades before asml founding photolithography is a complicated process whereby a blueprint of small circuits are crafted by beams Of light that are guided through a series of lenses and mirrors towards a photosensitive silicon wafer

the light will essentially create the design of the computer chip layer Byer layer which eventually forms circuits that goes on to create the computational foundations of our entire modern world now the precise kind of light used by photolithography machines is incredibly crucial to understand and early on back in the 1960s when this technology was First coming around they primarily relied on using only visible light beams which have a relatively large wavelength and are only capable of building out pretty large features on the Silicon wafer which is undesirable because the smaller you can get the transistor

the more of them you can pack onto the Silicon wafer and the more powerful the chip ultimately becomes smaller and smaller wavelengths of light were steadily used by photo lithographers to Build more and more powerful chips until asml came around in the 1980s to throw their hat in the ring too by 1986 asml had produced their first prototype photolithography machine but it was extremely rudimentary and was only capable of creating individual transistors on the scale of micrometers and it was basically more of a glorified photo copier than a true Marvel of engineering the company struggled

to actually find customers against the Industry leaders of the time made up by the Japanese firms Canon and Nikon and so asml was only kept alive for years by its parent company Phillips and by subsidies that came from the Dutch government but by 1995 asml was still able to grow just large enough to go public and list itself on the New York Stock Exchange just as the company was beginning to plan out a new photolithography machine that would harness a new idea called Extreme Ultraviolet or euv lithography you see visible light has a wavelength that

ranges between 380 and 750 nanm while ultraviolet light is much smaller with a wavelength that only ranges between 100 and 400 nanometers which means that by the 1980s and '90s when photolithography machines were harnessing ultraviolet light they were capable of producing much smaller patterns on chips than the previous generations of visible light machines were capable of and so computer Tuning power was getting stronger extreme ultraviolet light or euv light is a fraction the wavelength of even regular ultraviolet light ranging only 13.5 nanom for decades nobody had quite figured out how to actually use euv light

and photo lithography machines to produce even smaller transistors and circuits because producing it and working with it is an absolute devil of a task that requires an absolute Mastery of physics to actually pull off Canon And Nikon the industry leaders at the time were pursuing euv technology as well but abandoned it by the early 2000s as the costs of R&D ramped up and doubts emerged as to whether or not it was even going to be possible asml however stuck to the course of pursuing euv technology regardless of the Skeptics and sunk massive amounts of capital

and time into research and development of the tech over 17 years from 2000 up until 2017 asml blew through $6.5 billion on euv Research and development and had only managed to ship out a handful of products over that entire time but then finally after all that time and all that cash in 2017 the long bet of asml and the Netherlands on euv technology would finally pay off when the company actually managed to roll out an euv photolithography machine that not only worked extremely well but also actually made economic sense to purchasers of the machine the

2017 euv machine that asml Produced were not cheap costing around $100 million each to buy but they could print chip designs so small and do them quickly enough that all of the gigantic semiconductor manufacturing companies immediately ordered some from tsmc on Taiwan to Intel in the United States to Samsung in South Korea asml sold 10 of these $100 million machines in 2017 alone and dozens of additional orders were placed on backlog after Decades of effort a SML in the Netherlands suddenly Emerged in 2017 as the only company in the entire world that was producing euv

lithography machines essentially establishing a complete Monopoly on the product in the process and since then asml euv photolithography machines have only gotten more and more intricate and advanced and they're difficult to even fathom their machines are now capable of creating features on a silicon wafer that are down to 150,000 the width of a human hair each One of their machines contains more than 100,000 parts and they weigh about 180 tons while they're about the size of a double decker bus inside of them the machines will drop 50,000 tiny droplets of molten tin that are each

no thicker than a fifth of a human hair traveling at more than 250 km per hour through a chamber every single second which all Gets Zapped by a pair of outrageously precise lasers that creates a plasma that releases the e UV light that is Then Guided by mirrors and lenses towards the blank silicon canvas that eventually becomes a chip the mirrors requireed to guide this euv light within the machine are ground down to probably be among the flattest objects in the entire universe they are so impossibly smooth that the largest imperfection on them is no

more than the distance grass will grow in a single millisecond if the mirrors were scaled up to the size of Germany there would be no bumps or Imperfections on them larger than a single millimeter and since euv light gets absorbed by just about everything including by air this entire process has to take place within the machine in a total vacuum each of their newest euv machines now cost more than $300 million to purchase about the same price as a brand new Boeing trip 7 and they are almost certainly the most highly sophisticated tool that Humanity

has ever produced and sold commercially even Transporting one of these machines from asml fact countes and Europe to customers around the world is an insanely difficult and expensive process the machines have to be assembled and tested in the Netherlands first to make sure they actually work and if they're successful the machine will be completely disassembled and transported to its customer using 20 trucks and then three fully loaded Boeing 747 jumbo Jets asml has more than 5,000 supplier Partnerships that uses to build these fantastic machines and each one requires the labor of about $1,000 people to

actually create they are very very difficult to actually replicate and so far nobody else has managed to create an economical euv lithography machine and even if somehow someone else did they would have to convince the small number of asml customers to aband in ship and switch providers which will be hard because asml already has the established Relationships there's basically only five total customers in the entire world who buy these machines and asml is continuing to innovate and Advance their own machines even further this is all how asml has come to dominate a whopping 83% of

the global lithography market right now in 2024 with their sole Monopoly over the production of euv lithography machines and it has made the entire outside world extremely extremely reliant on the Netherlands and on asml As a result such is the importance of asml lithography machines that the former president and CTO of asml Martin vandenbrink exclaimed ear earlier this year that our prime minister was sitting in front of xiin ping not because he was from Holland who'd give a about Holland he was there because we are making euv naturally because as sml's euv lithography machines are

required to create the most advanced computer chips That are necessary for building the most advanced military equipment the two Global superpowers the United States and China are increasingly growing more and more dependent on the Dutch and their Monopoly on euv machines as a result whoever ever between them can maintain access to asml machines will inevitably wield the most technologically advanced military in the 21st century so to prevent China from ever gaining access to machines for their own chip industry And Military the United States has consistently applied pressure on the Dutch government to restrict asml from

selling their most advanced euv machines to China and in 2023 the Biden Administration even pressured the Netherlands even further to restrict some of asml older less Advanced lithography machines to China as well despite China having been asl's biggest Market in 2023 accounting for about a third of its total revenue for the whole Year there are fears that if asml is eventually blocked out from China entirely the Chinese will then have no other choice but to begin investing heavily into their own photo lithography sector and to eventually build out their own euv machines which could finally

provide asml with some competition but until then and as it stands right now no other company in the world is anywhere close to challenging asl's dominance in this sector and the company controls an Absolute Monopoly on the machines that make our entire modern world possible as a result the latest Monopoly and the long history of monopolies that have been enjoyed by the Dutch trade Empire whether it's the control of these marvelous machines that make all of our technology possible they're vast green houses that nearly compete with the United States on food production their control of

the largest natural gas field in Europe their control of the largest Port in the world World outside of East Asia their vast network of internal waterways and infrastructure or their conquest of new lands from the sea the Dutch have proven themselves time and time again as the most overpowered country in Europe punching far far above with their own small population and small land size would otherwise suggest and I very deeply admire them for everything they have managed to accomplish they have completely Transformed their small swampy flood prone River delta into a major world power that

has continually withstood the test of time well into the 21st century today that has defined human history and they will continue doing so for the foreseeable future to me though I think the most impressive fact about the Dutch is just how much food they're capable of producing in their small country they're global leaders in cheese tomatoes and potatoes and they somehow manage to Export more meat than any other country in Europe does and if all of that stuff about the Netherlands food production suddenly made you very hungry you're not alone and if you're anything like

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