I read parent’s question as looking at a bigger scale (along the lines of guns, germs & steel). Leaders come and go, and on a pretty short time frame compared t

I read parent’s question as looking at a bigger scale (along the lines of guns, germs & steel). Leaders come and go, and on a pretty short time frame compared to mass deforestation. The question is more, if you don’t have access to enough wood for a good iron supply chain, are you fucked in the long term? If you don’t have a competitive amount of metal to begin with, “just go take it from someone else” is a lot easier said than done. I’d be really interested to hear a well researched answer, but my guess is the answer is ambiguous. When you think of areas with little available wood, they’re mostly pretty marginal to begin with. Deserts, grasslands, etc. Places without enough water to support major agriculture and centralization. Maybe part of the reason people might stay in a marginal area is because it’s hard to get enough metal to conquer something better. But what about someone like the Mongols? They couldn’t possibly have a huge charcoal-making operation. So where’s their iron coming from? Trade? (For horses, maybe?) Plunder? But if you’re gonna kill someone and take his stuff, you need your own sword to do it with. The iron-availability ball has to get rolling somewhere else before you can really start conquering anyone. The big exception is Japan (although their problem is geology not timber), but their geographic isolation means they don’t really answer parents question about what happens to an iron-poor (or rather iron production input poor) society next door to an iron-rich one.