April 2025 - Zeihan on Geopolitics

The Fire Hose of Chaos: Don’t Expect Many Trade Deals

Photo of a bronze trump looking at a globe

The Trump administration can put out as much trade deal fluff as they want, but the reality is that the internal dysfunction and unpredictable nature of this admin will impede most deals from ever making it out of an email chain.

Trade negotiations are complex and take years to develop. Given the state of organizational paralysis, there’s just not enough people to handle most of these talks. All of that back and forth, up and down, and dragging through the mud has left a sour taste in most countries’ mouths. And with no real beta on how to successfully approach these trade deals, what’s the point in trying?

So, take those official claims that ‘progress is being made’ and ‘real trade talks are happening’ with a truckload of salt.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. The fire hose of chaos continues. And today we’re gonna talk about trade deals and why you really shouldn’t expect many. First of all, let’s talk about the organizational side of things. Usually it takes the United States about six months of consulting with industry and consulting with Congress just to build its general position on a trade talk.

And then you go into talks with the other side, the fastest trade deal the United States has ever negotiated with Singapore. It took about 18 months. Most of them take the better part of a decade because there are so many pieces in motion. Even the Treasury secretary says that meaningful talks aren’t going to begin for another five weeks, and the first results aren’t going to happen with six months.

Even that is just a grossly optimistic time frame. And what you normally do is the trade talks reach a point of stagnation down the road. Then you start throwing around the threat of tariffs. By doing it in the front end, everybody’s kind of on the wrong foot. And to be perfectly blunt, the United States isn’t ready to have these talks.

Part of that is also organizationally, when the Trump administration came in, he came in with a much smaller Cordray than most presidents do. It’s really just the cabinet and a few senior aides. The Trump administration then proceeded to gut all of the departments of everyone in the top, several echelons, and then never staffed those positions with anyone but loyalists.

And so there really aren’t a lot of people who even know how to negotiate in the first place, much less do a trade deal. So there’s really only four people in the US administration that are capable of holding the talks. You’ve got Jamison Greer, the US Trade Representative Office. You’ve got Howard Slotnick Commerce. You’ve got Scott percent at Treasury.

And then, of course, the president himself. That’s four. And all of them have other things to do. Normally you would have literally hundreds of people taking care of all the technical aspects of the talks. And so when another country reaches out to the United States to do exactly what Donald Trump says he wants them to do. Open conversations on all of the topics.

There are no people at the lower levels to carry on those conversations. It’s just the four at the top, and all of them are very, very busy doing everything they do with their normal day job. On top of several dozen trade negotiations. And so we’re hearing reports left, right and center from even larger trading partners that messages are going on responded.

And any offer that they make is just met with silence for their part. The Trade Representative’s office says that it’s sending the things on to the president that he thinks are worth the president’s time. But everything just snarled up because the president is doing other things. That’s kind of piece one. Piece two is much more visceral because of the way Donald Trump has approached these things.

There isn’t a lot of trust. So consider the situations of our top four trading partners outside of China. So first, Canada, Canada took a hard line position of resisting what the Trump administration did in its early days. And as a result, it got slapped with tariffs that haven’t come off. Mexico decided to bend and give the Trump administration everything it wanted. And as a result, it was slapped with tariffs. So with our top two trading partners, no one knows what the approach should be because the result is the same as for the Europeans. It’s a security issue. Trump administration came in, basically withdrew support for Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting Russia. Russia is the only reason that NATO alliance exists.

It was created by the United States to contain the Russians. And so the Europeans quite rightly see the United States as a security threat. And anything that happens on the trade front, as a subsidiary to that. And the Trump administration doesn’t want to talk about the security situation at all unless the Europeans buy lots and lots of weapons.

But still do everything the United States says. And so we’re getting a split in the security identity of the entire Western civilization. Because of this disconnect between the two, what the Trump administration says it wants, what it’s doing. And then throwing the tariff situation into the mix. And so the Europeans really don’t see a benefit to discussing anything with the Trump administration until such time that the NATO situation is untangled.

And then finally, you’ve got Japan. Japan has tried to take a relatively low profile in this, and it’s mostly one of, it’s kind of a combination of betrayal and disgust that they’re feeling.

During the first Trump administration, Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, specifically came to Washington, cut a humiliating deal specifically to get in with Donald Trump so that whatever the future of the United States would be, whatever the future of Japan would be, the hard work would be done, and they could proceed together.

So the deal was negotiated by Trump, was signed by Trump, was enforced by Trump. And in the last month, the Trump administration has basically abrogated the deal and told the Japanese to start over. And the Japanese position is, if you want, honor your own deals, why in the world should we bend over backwards to negotiate another one with you?

And so the official story is that everyone is reaching out to negotiate, and lots of good deals are being made. But the bottom line is, none of our trade partners really see the point in doing this, because everything is so erratic today is April 16th. Today, the Trump administration announced its 95th tariff policy in 45 days, raising the tariff rate on many Chinese products to 245%.

As long as everything is so erratic, there is no point in having a conversation with the United States. Even if you can get someone on the phone because the rest of the world just doesn’t know yet what this administration actually wants. The goalposts are changing on a daily basis, sometimes an hourly basis until that settles.

Trade talks. Real trade talks can’t even begin.

The Fire Hose of Chaos: Wait, The Recession Is Already Here?

What could have happened much, much further down the road (or even avoided given the right circumstances) is now in the headlines – the US is headed into a recession. And if you wanted to send a thank you card to someone, you could send it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and address it to the Trump administration.

Between the unpredictable tariffs and constantly evolving regulatory shifts, this recession seems like it was part of the “plan” all along. The four big contributors are government spending remaining high, industrial construction on hold since March, manufacturing getting hit hard by tariffs, and consumer spending slowing.

Even if Trump’s reshoring efforts worked perfectly, we’d still be looking at two years of inflation and recession. And nothing in this administration has been done perfectly so expect this recession to be much deeper and longer than necessary.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Iowa. Happy Easter week. Happy Easter week? Happy Easter week. Any who, a lot of you have written in to ask, whether I think we’re going to be in a recession and why? Short answer is. Yeah, yeah. First, the caveat. When the United States was making its presidential transition back in January, pretty much all of the signals for consumption activity, for industrial activity, for government activity were all green.

I don’t mean to suggest there weren’t some complications in there are some things to kind of keep an eye on. But we were in the middle of an economic expansion. There was no reason for expect that to change. But the policies of Donald Trump have been so erratic, so consistently, ironically, that business confidence, has collapsed. And the United States is now in a situation where it is dealing with regulatory and geopolitical risk, which is something that business communities hate.

On top of that, you have the tariffs, where in the last six weeks we’ve had 92 tariff policies, which make it impossible for anyone, business or consumer or even state and local governments to plan. So we’ve seen everything freeze up. And this is definitely going to cause a recession and a rough one and one that is completely unnecessary.

So let’s just kind of go through the four categories of where the growth comes from. First, government. This is actually the one I’m least concerned about. Despite everything that Doge has done with firing people, it turns out that the president doesn’t have the authority to fire most federal workers. Neither does the Office of Management and Budget, and certainly Doge, which doesn’t even have a congressional mandate.

Instead, every department in the federal government does have a federal mandate. And as congressionally mandated activities. So you can’t fire these people without congressional activity. So everything that Doge has done is pretty much already been unwound. The total budget savings and the low double digits of billions and 90% of the workers have already been rehired, doesn’t mean that they won’t be fired.

Now, the Trump administration, in kind of round two is actually doing it the right way, going through the cabinet secretaries and getting legal structure from Congress for the reductions. And that will work. But that won’t manifest this quarter and probably not next quarter. So what that means is, even with the federal government being in chaos, the spending is still happening.

So we’re getting none of the functionality of government, but all of the cost of government. And from an economic point of view, that is a slight negative, but not a big one. So government’s kind of a non-factor right now. Next up is industrial spending, primarily on construction of new industrial plant. Now, in calendar year 2023 and 2024, we were setting records every single month, and it all came to a screeching halt on the 1st of March of this year because of all the changes in the regulatory structure programs, and because of all the chaos with the tariff policy, no one knows what the cost structure is any longer to build in the United States.

And so no one is building in the United States. We have already had a longer stretch of zero industrial construction, at any point, in the United States, since World War two. Now that is only about 10% of the economy, but it’s at a huge drag right now. Next up is manufacturing. Primarily the problem here are tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which are coming in and out and changing on a regular basis, just like with everything else.

But it’s really hit things like auto spending, Your average automotive has 30,000 parts and on par, all of the parts basically go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth across borders to whichever one of the three NAFTA partners do the best. And on May 2nd, we don’t simply have tariffs on Finnish cars.

We have it on all of those auto parts. And so we’re looking at the average cost of a vehicle going up by 12 to $20,000. If it’s made in North America. And that is going to be crushing. So with the existing tariff that we have right now that was implemented on the first week of April, that was already enough to trigger manufacturing recession and the really heavily auto committed places like Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio.

And what we’re going to see, in the 1st of May is that will spill out to the other 25 states that are big into transport technology, and that’s everybody from Washington to Texas to, South Carolina. So then we get a manufacturing, recession. That’s another 15 to 20% of GDP. And then finally there’s consumption, which is the big boy, three stories here.

First of all, Trump says we’re going to get agricultural tariffs very, very soon. In fact, by the time you see this video might have already happened, for the bottom quintile of the American population, one third of income is spent on food. So that immediately is enough to translate into a consumption recession for the poor and especially poorer parts of the United States, such as the Deep South or some parts of the Rocky Mountains.

Second, the wealthy, most of their consumption is tightly correlated to what’s going on with the stock market. And that’s been a shit show for the last couple of months. So all of a sudden, the people who have the highest amounts of capital are probably going to be drawing back. And third, the tariffs at the time of this recording, we have 145% tariff on, on China, which is where most of our electronics and consumer goods come from.

So you throw that on top of what everyone would normally purchase and, you get a consumption led recession across the entire system very, very quickly. Now, the end goal here, of course, of the Trump administration’s policies are to expand the industrial footprint in the United States and get back into manufacturing in a big way. But that takes a lot of things like steel and aluminum, copper.

And we now have tariffs on all of those things. So building out this industrial plant will be very, very expensive. And if everything goes the way that Donald Trump says it will, we won’t see the first output from these new factories within two years, which means that this transition period best case scenario, according to Trump’s words himself, is two years of inflation and recessionary activity.

That’s assuming that he’s made the plan perfectly. He hasn’t. And that assumes that he’s right about what he’s doing. He’s not. So yes, recession probably starting off formally, statistically in the second quarter, certainly in the third, and lasting a lot longer than it would have ever needed to.

Should the US Stay in the Middle East?

Photo of a Marine on top of a HESCO barrier

Here’s a video I recorded while I was in New Zealand at the end of 2024. In this video, we cover a question that the US is still trying to answer – should the US maintain its presence in the Middle East?

The US has been involved in the Middle East for quite some time, but times are changing. The US is now energy independent, but US involvement in the region was never about energy for the US; involvement in the region was about securing energy supplies for US allies and maintaining strategic alliances against the Soviet Union.

The US has a few paths to choose between, and each option leads us to a very different geopolitical picture. Remember, this isn’t just about energy, this is about alliances, power, and strategy.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here on the Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand. The weather. So we’re not seeing much, but I figured I’d take a question from the Patreon forum. And specifically it is, I’ve always been told that the United States was involved in the Middle East for oil, but now that the US is energy independent, does that change?

Is there a reason to stay? Great question. I’m not sure I’ve got an answer for you, but I can at least inform the debate. Keep in mind, until 1973, the United States was an oil exporter. We were an importer from roughly 1973 until roughly 2013. I mean, you can fudge those numbers a little bit, but about that.

But the United States remained one of the world’s largest oil producers. Right up until the 1990s. And we most of the crude that we got came from the Western Hemisphere, with Canada, Mexico and Venezuela being our three largest sources. It was pretty rare for us to get more than 10 or 20% of our crude on a daily basis from the Middle East.

Most of what we did get was typically, equator, Saudi Arabia. And in order to make sure that we had an interest in defending them, what they would do is park a supertanker off the US Gulf Coast and basically wait for an order. Because they knew that they couldn’t defend themselves if push came to shove. It is a Kuwait.

That was absolutely true. Anyway, the point is, is that we didn’t use much of their crude. Most of the crude that, is exported from the Persian Gulf went to our allies, first in Europe and later in Northeast Asia. Keep in mind, during the Cold War, China was an ally. So the reason wasn’t so much for oil per se, but for the strategic alliance that we built to contain and beat back the Soviet Union.

Keep in mind that the Soviet Union is a land based power that takes up a very large chunk of Eurasia, and there was no way that the United States, a maritime power, could counter it at all points of the compass at all times. We needed allies for that, and that means we needed allies that were willing to take a degree of risk.

So you basically indirectly support countries like Britain and France and Italy and Germany and Korea and Taiwan and China and Japan, in order for them to be able to hold onto the alliance. And if for whatever reason, the United States proved unable or unwilling to do that, then these countries that were serving American strategic interests would have to have a deep conversation with themselves about whether or not the alliance is going to work for them at all, because if you don’t have oil, you’re talking about a deindustrialization process and a catastrophic drop in economic activity and standard of living

Anyway, some version of that is what the conversation needs to be in the United States today. We don’t need the oil. That’s obvious. In fact, we’re even retooling more and more of a refining complex to specifically run the light, sweet crude that comes out of the shale fields. But the rest of the world needs middle Eastern crude.

And so one of the things that we did after World War two is make that globalization for a security deal that brought us to more or less the current day. It is time for the United States to lead a conversation with the allies on what the next chapter of that looks like. Now, the last president in the United States who started us down the road of having that conversation was George Herbert Walker Bush.

And if you remember the 1000 points of light in the New World order, that was the core of it to renegotiate the deal. We voted him out of office. And in every election since then, we’ve voted for someone who is actually less interested in maintaining the global order. I would actually argue that, Joe Biden was less interested in that than Donald Trump.

So it’s kind of a wash. This last one.

But this is a conversation we need to have, because if our decision is no, we’re not interested in the Middle East. We’re not interested in maintaining an alliance of nations to help us achieve our goals. Then we have to do it all ourselves. And then we have to decide whether we want to basically ostrich here in North America or massively expand the military complex so we can at least attempt to do it all by ourselves.

Personally, I don’t think either of those are particularly attractive options. If you look at the long run of American history, every time we do truly, nationalist and really do ostrich down, something happens in the Eastern Hemisphere that draws us back in in a very ugly way that costs us hundreds of thousands of lives. But I’m not the only one who’s a decision maker here.

And this is the conversation that we all need to have.

Oh, one more thing. There’s more to maintaining a presence in the Middle East than just being Mr. Nice Guy for an alliance. For example, China today is the world’s largest oil importer, bringing in somewhere between 12 and 14 million barrels a day based on whose numbers you’re using. If the United States controls the ability of the region to send crude out, you could shut off China in a day.

Food for thought.

I Hope You Didn’t Want to Buy a Home

Trump’s endless tariff policies will likely hit just about every corner of the American economy, but the US housing industry is poised to take a devastating blow.

Mortgage rates are higher, there’s a labor shortage, and material costs are on the rise, which all make the concept of homeownership less attainable. You would think that the aging population would help free up some of that real estate, but the boomers are aging in place, rather than downsizing or going to a retirement home.

So, if you already own a home…good for you! If you do not…I hear Van-life is all the rage right now!

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Florida, doing kind of an open ended series now on the effects of the tariffs on the US economic structure. And today we’re going to talk about housing. It is probably the sector that’s going to get hit hardest, with the exception of electronics imports. Both from the point of view of supply and from the point of view, of course.

So let me just run through it real quick. First of all, if you want to buy a house, you have to get a mortgage, unless you’re incredibly lucky and mortgage rates are going up for a couple of reasons. Number one, if the Trump administration does what it says it wants to do, it’s going to increase deficit spending by roughly 1 trillion US a year, which will put pressure on the debt market hugely.

And all those ten year Treasury bills the Treasury Department is going to have to issue, are going to add up and raise the cost of a mortgage because it’s based on the ten year Treasury. That’s number one. Number two, we were moving in this direction anyway. Most of the free capital in a system comes from a population of people aged 55 to 65, who haven’t yet retired but are preparing to.

Their incomes are very high, their expenses are low, and the difference between those two generally gets shoved away for the future because they know when they retire, they’re going to have to basically cash out of their high velocity investments. So stocks and bonds become T-bills and cash. Well, as of January of this year, two thirds of the American baby boomers, the largest generation we have ever had, have retired.

That liquidation has already happened. I’d argue that most of the reason we’ve seen a quadrupling in capital costs across the overall economy these last five years hasn’t been Covid. It hasn’t been Biden or Trump or the fed. It’s just been the boomers doing what you do when you retire. Well, that hits mortgage rates as well. And then we have Trump’s more specific policies, basically liquidating the migrant workforce.

Trump says he wants to send about half of at home, roughly 5 million people. Well, the industry that migrant workers are most likely to work in after agriculture is construction. In addition, we have tariffs on steel and aluminum, which are two of the four biggest components that go into home building, the other two being copper and wood, which are also under sanctions.

So all of the inputs that are necessary to build a house in the first place are seeing their prices go up even as finance goes up. And there’s one more angle to keep in mind if something happens to your car, if something happens to your housing, if you draw upon your insurance policy for rebuilding, you still need labor and steel and aluminum and copper and wood.

While you might not need wood for the car, but the rest of it. And so insurance premiums are probably going up 20 to 30% just this year, specifically because of new policies out of the federal government. Finally, the boomers themselves, unlike the generations that have come before, who move into smaller units when they retire, whether it’s an apartment or assisted living or something like that, boomers are far more likely to stay in their home and age in place.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. But what it does mean is the single largest concentration of homes that owned by the boomers is not getting freed up as part of this demographic turnover. And so if you are a millennial and especially, a member of generation Z, the quantity of housing simply isn’t there. The older generation is staying in place.

The newer construction costs more. The home insurance that you have to get to get the mortgage costs more. And the mortgage mortgage itself costs more. You add it all up and housing is just expensive and only going to get more. So we cannot build it fast enough. And even if we could, the components that go into it are more expensive than they have ever been relative to the average income in American history.

So if you happened to own your house, of course, this is all great news because we’re entering a higher inflationary environment, which will eat down the cost of your loan relative to your income. So if you were in a position where you have already established yourself, this is great. If you’re trying to get going. This is awful. And that is one more problem that we’re going to have with inequality down the road.

Is Trump Playing 4D Chess?

If you’re like me, you’ve probably sat at your computer for hours on end, reading tons of articles, watching countless interviews, and you still have one question…Does Trump have any strategy at all?

Here’s the most recent example as to why my answer is no. The Treasury Secretary hinted at a plan to unite US allies first, then confront China – that makes a lot of sense. Trump, however, has taken the approach of threatening and pissing off all the US allies – that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Relations with China are in shambles, there is no leadership in the government, multi-country negotiations are laughable, and there are no clear goals or an end in sight. If you still think that Trump is playing 4D chess, I hope for everyone’s sake that you’re right.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Peter Zeihan here coming to your Denver airport. And, in the aftermath of all the back and forth on tariffs, specifically with China, it’s worth asking the question, is there a strategy here? We’re all looking for our own world, desperate to find one. And by we, I mean Americans in general in the wider world.

Everything at the white House seems completely chaotic, and it may well be, but we did have the Treasury secretary. Mr. Bassett mentioned that, the specific goal was to box in China. In his words, we’ll probably strike a deal first with our allies that they’ve been good military allies and plus good economic allies. And once we have that deal in place, then we were all together.

Go and confront the Chinese. And for someone like me who plays in the world of big geopolitics, that’s really sexy and really attractive and is probably potentially a very effective way to do it. But there are a few problems. I mean, the first and most obviously, that is not how it’s happened so far. The Trump administration.

Well, actually, let’s be honest here, Donald Trump has threatened all of the allies, some with military invasion, and that’s usually not the sort of activity you want to do if you are going to then try to build a coalition. There’s also the leadership issue and the coordination issue. The Trump administration, again, Donald Trump personally gutted the upper tiers of every department, including defense and state as well as commerce.

So there simply aren’t a deep cadre of staff that can carry out multiple negotiations at the same time. It’s really just Donald Trump himself. And even if you believe that he’s the best negotiator in human history, still just one guy and he’s got other things going on. So the idea that he can build a coalition of several dozen countries and then lead them in negotiations against the power, that definitely flies in the face of what your lying eyes are seeing on a regular basis.

Third, the value of the tariffs. We’re now up to 125%, I believe, is the current number for the tariff level with China. That’s enough to freeze commerce between the two countries, with the notable exception of a few things that we can’t get from anywhere else, which will just kind of suck up the cost. Trade is basically going to collapse already, and that’s before you consider that on April 17th, Chinese shipping companies and Chinese ships are going to face an additional fee on top of everything else when they hit an American port.

There’s not a lot of room here for negotiation and putting the Chinese in a box. While I do enjoy seeing it, is not really conducive to having a meaningful negotiation relationship. And then, of course, there’s the little Intel thing. As I’ve started doing pieces on the tariff issue, I had people from the administration contacted me from time to time.

And the most enlightening 1 or 2 of them, number one, was a guy who’s deep in MAGA world who said that the morning of the tariff announcements on April 2nd, that they still haven’t started putting together. And if you remember, the tariffs that were adopted on, April 2nd, the reciprocal tariffs were nothing of the kind, rather than looking at what everybody’s tariff levels were and what non-tariff barriers such as currency manipulation might have been, all they did, all Trump did was take the trade deficit and divide it by what we export. And that was the number, no basis in fact, no basis in reality had nothing to do with trade policy whatsoever.

It was just a fabricated number. So nobody knows what it is that the Trump administration is actually after. So there is no way to position yourself for meaningful talks because you don’t know what success looks like. Canada has definitely been on the receiving end of this in the worst possible way. Trump originally said it was about fentanyl, but the U.S. sends a couple of orders of magnitude more illegal narcotics north than comes south.

And he said it was about illegal migrants. The U.S. sends more illegal migrants north and south as well, again by an order of ten. He said it was about dairy, but we don’t send them in enough dairy to even qualify for their terrace level. So now it’s about Canada becoming the 51st state, and that really doesn’t leave a lot of basis for negotiations, negotiations.

It’s not just about providing people with a method of meeting you part way, but you have to let them know what it is you actually want so they can actually think about giving it to you. And we haven’t established that relationship with anyone yet. So the more likely outcome is we just get a direct clash between Chairman XI of China and Donald Trump of the United States, and that goes on a lot of very interesting and particularly dangerous directions.

Now, again, this is all great for me. Chaos and dysfunction are my jam. But in the meantime, the world’s largest economy and really everybody else’s economy are hanging by a thread in the meantime. And we’re looking at a recessionary stagflation area environment until this is resolved one way or another, assuming it is resolved at all.

Of Tariffs, Manufacturing and PSAs

Photo of man working in a manufacturing shop

The tariffs on China are now effectively 145% and penalties tied to Venezuelan oil could raise that to 170%. Trump’s tariff policies are nearing the triple digits, so the level of uncertainty filling every board room is chilling.

While the idea of moving manufacturing away from China is an attractive idea, Trump is trying to brute force his way through this obstacle. When you do that with one of the most complex and developed global trade systems, it’s not going to be a fun process. And there’s no safety net to this. With allies like Canada and Mexico under the pressure of their own set of tariffs imposed by Trump, who is going to pick up the manufacturing? Or help with the industrial buildout?

Needless to say, we’re heading down a very painful road. My piece of advice – you may want to pick up an extra phone or laptop while it’s still (somewhat) affordable.

(Well, that lasted for a bit…)

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Florida. And while I was on my way here, the Trump administration issued a clarification of the tariffs on China that they’re actually not 125%, the 145%, because some of the tariffs that were on earlier are stuck with the ones that are here now. And that’s before you apply, the tariffs for China using, Venezuelan crude, which would take it up to 170.

So I thought it would be useful to give a little bit of a technical update. Paired with a bit of a public service announcement. So the whole goal for what Donald Trump is trying to do here, which I broadly agree with, the goal is to bring manufacturing away from the Chinese space and into the US space. The problem is that, you don’t do that overnight, especially for more technical things.

So when you see the Commerce secretary saying nonsense about having Americans work in factories screwing iPhones together, I mean, that’s just stupid, because that’s not how it works. The iPhone, for example, has 1100 supply chain steps, and they’re scattered across East Asia with about 90% of them either starting, ending, or being centered in China. So it’s not like you move one factory, you move 1100 plus all of the logistical and labor support that goes with it.

And before you say the US can do this quickly, keep in mind that it took Apple 25 years to develop the iPhone and then another 20 years for it to turn into the product that it is today. Those supply chains are the end result of 40 years of breakneck industrialization and industrial development that was ultimately funded by debt driven investment funds, that it’s a combination of capturing all of the spare savings of the population over the course of the last 50 years, combined with a huge amount of currency printing.

You’re talking about a combined industrial plant in China of roughly 40 trillion U.S. dollars equivalent. Even if the United States was to put $2 trillion of federal spending towards this project a year at the soonest, you would be expect the United States to be able to build an iPhone. It’s somewhere around 12 to 15 years from now, which means that no matter how high the tariffs get under the 45 right now, you should not expect to get meaningful American manufacturers with the next two years.

In fact, Trump has said himself personally that we should see the first fruits of this project within two years. Two years is when we start to see the benefits. And honestly, that assumes that we have partners in this in Mexico and Canada. That is very clearly not clear right now because the Canadians and the Mexicans are under tariffs just like everybody else.

So no one even wants to start building the industrial plant until there’s some clarity. And the announcement today that said that China is now up to 145. That is the 92nd tariff policy that we have had in this country in the just the last six weeks. And until things settle down a little bit, I don’t expect anyone to start investing hundreds of billions of dollars.

Now what else? What we’ve been seeing in the last six years, roughly, is an evolution in the understanding of manufacturers about how reliable China is as a place to manufacture. So during Covid, everyone started diversifying away from China. They called it a China plus one strategy. And then about 18 months ago, well before Donald Trump had even won the primaries, there was a realization that China is no longer the low cost producer.

There’s the sunk cost of the industrial plant, and that is a massive motivator. But Chinese labor now costs roughly two, two and a half times as much as Mexican labor, and it’s not as highly skilled. So we were going from a China plus one strategy to an anything but China strategy. Well, in the last six weeks, what Donald Trump has achieved has gone from an US only strategy for consumption to a US plus one strategy in the mind of all of the world’s major global manufacturing companies.

So until we get clarity on the regulation, on what federal support might look like on the power grid, on the ability of the United States to produce the base materials like steel and aluminum, copper and wood and all the rest. No one’s putting anything here for the last two years, we have set regular records for industrial construction spending in the United States as part of the diversification away from China and the reshoring from China.

But because we’ve had policies changing, oftentimes hour by hour, everyone is just stalled. And for the first time since Covid, and for the second time since World War two, industrial construction spending has basically gone to zero. Until we have clarity, that’s where it’s going to stay. Now, if I can take a flight across the country and we don’t get a new tariff policy by the time we land, then we can start the conversation about how we can begin the 12 to 20 year process to achieve what Donald Trump really wants, which means that your average low end iPhone is going to cost a shade under $3,000 if it’s originating in China, because while China may not be the most advanced manufacturing power, they are the assembly power.

And so all the parts circulate around East Asia, are centered into China and then shipped from China to the United States, all of them qualifying for that 145% tariff. Which means that effective. Now, if you want electronics, you want your iPhone, you want your computer. Without that massive markup, you have to buy something where the inventory already exists.

In the United States, because anything new coming in has that price markup. So Apple flew apparently 60 tons of product into the country a couple of days ago to get in under their wire. And that’s all that’s left. So you want to save a few thousand bucks, buy your new computer, buy your backup computer, buy your new phone, buy your backup phone.

Now, I bought three of each.

Stopping Trump’s Tariffs with A New Trade Act

It’s hard to equate Trump’s tariff policies to much of anything, but the movie “Unstoppable” where Denzel Washington needs to stop a runaway train might be the best I can come up with. And just like in the movie, there is a quickly approaching curve that the train is going to fly off (the curve in this analogy is stagflation, recession, and a hindrance of US industrialization).

All standard measures of stopping this ‘train’ are gone. Both political parties are fractured, Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists, and the traditional policy influencers have been sidelined, while the judiciary doesn’t typically intervene in trade policy, Congress does have constitutional authority over tariffs. While this power was ceded to the president through the Trade Act of 1974, a new bi-partisan effort called the Trade Act of 2025 could reclaim it. This bill would require congressional approval for tariffs to remain in place beyond 60 days.

Even if this did make it to Trump’s desk, it would be sent back to the Senate and require a veto-proof majority, which isn’t going to happen any time soon. It’s probably going to take red states feeling some significant economic impacts before we can entertain the idea of slowing, much less stopping, this train.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado on a bright, sunny, shiny, snowy morning. Anyway, taking a question from the Patreon crowd today, and it’s with all this terror fun and games that’s going on in Washington at the white House. Is there any institution? Is there any person? Is there anything in the United States that could make it stop and maybe unwind it?

So we aren’t in a stagflation era environment so we don’t face down a protracted recession, and that we can actually keep the industrialization that we already have. It doesn’t look great. We’re at a time of political transition here in the United States, where both of the political parties have broken down. The Democrats basically collapsed in the last election, and it’s reasonable to think that they won’t come back.

And the Republicans have been so subsumed in the cult of Trump that all of the business leaders and national security leaders and so on. That used to be the bedrock of the Republican Party. How are I best being called rhinos at worst, are being called Democrats or something else? Anyway, so the normal political things that could, shape a president’s behavior are gone.

In addition, Donald Trump is a nonstandard president, and he’s made sure that there is no one in his circle who knows anything. His chief manufacturing trade adviser has never manufactured a thing in his life. His commerce secretary is craven, and there is no one in the upper echelons of any of the departments that really knows anything about their purview, because Trump fired everyone and replaced them with political lackeys.

So he only accepts into his circle the information he wants. And one of the few bodies that actually has access to that circle are the Russians. And anything that destroys American long term economic vitality is something they’re going to be enthusiastic about. So you can expect a steady drip of that sort of misinformation going right to the top.

As for the other levers of government, the judiciary never touches trade, or at least only obliquely. So there’s no one you can sue in order to get a court ruling that might make this better. The only body that matters, the only body that has really ever mattered when it comes to hemming in a president who’s gone off the rails is the Senate.

And I’m not talking here about impeachment, although that is obviously, something that they’re famous, infamous for based on your politics. But, the Constitution very, very clearly lays out that interstate, intrastate and tariff policy is a congressional purview, not one of the executive branch. The executive has no native powers to regulate international trade at all. What happened is we had something called the Trade Act back in 1974 that gave the president tariff authority.

So this is power that has been granted to the president decades ago, a half century ago. And so if Trump is going to be stopped or reined in or mollified or something, it has to come from the Senate basically initiating a repeal of that act. And that process has begun. Something called the Trade Act of 2025, which a couple of senators, one Republican and one Democrat, have co-sponsored, and it’s starting to get traction.

If it were to pass, however, it would still then have to pass the president’s desk, and he would undoubtedly veto it. So it would have to pass by a veto proof majority. We’re nowhere near the political forces that be shifting in that sort of direction. We will have to have a more severe economic downturn than just a stock market crash like we’ve seen in the last few days.

We’re talking about something that puts a lot of people out of work in a lot of red states. Keep in mind that Republicans have 53 of the 100 and Senate seats. You would need at least 67 senators to vote against the president for this to work. And even then, we’re just at the start of the process. Then we have to unwind a lot of stuff.

Anyway, the person to watch is, the senator from my home state, Iowa. Chuck Grassley, he’s the senior member of the Senate now, I believe he’s like 185,000 years old, almost as old as Biden and Trump. Anyway, he’s been in the Senate for 35, 40, 60 century since the US was founded. Years. Long time. Anyway, what Chuck Grassley is known for more than anything else is he’s a rule of law fanatic.

And while he has gone along with Donald Trump’s plans on pretty much everything, he’s done so with a wince, the whole way, because he knows that these are not conservative values. These are not good for the United States. But the party has shifted, and he feels he has to shift with it.

But he was one of the co-sponsors for this bill that would repeal, presidential Tariff Authority, basically, if, if, if, if the bill in its current form were to become law after 60 days. You have to convince the Senate, that, the tariff is a good idea, otherwise it goes away.

So you can use it as a negotiating ploy, but it doesn’t make it into policy. Whether that’s good or bad or indifferent is really not the point. The point is, is that the, the champion of rule on the Senate has been roused, and things are starting to move nowhere close to a resolution. But the process has started.

Tariff spotlight: Vietnam

Photo of flag of Vietnam with tourists on top of a mountain

One of the countries who got caught up in the ‘Liberation Day’ crossfire was Vietnam. Through an arbitrary and poorly informed process, Vietnam was slapped with a 46% tariff.

Trump’s team is filled with loyalists that lack any semblance of expertise in their designated areas, so these inflated tariffs are more about pleasing Trump than logic. Which doesn’t make for great economic policy in case you were wondering.

Vietnam has been a key ally in reducing US dependence on China, but since Vietnam doesn’t import enough from the US due to the income disparity, Trump and his lackeys sniffed a trade deficit and bibbidi, bobbidi, punitive tariffs.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey all, Peter zine here, coming to you from a snowy Colorado. Don’t worry, it’ll be 70 degrees tomorrow. Any who, one of the countries that Donald Trump put tariffs on or. I mean, I guess, but not on all countries. But one of the bigger ones was Vietnam, who got a 46% tariff increase. There’s three things going on here.

All of them are pretty stupid. So first of all, there’s the method. I have it from good sources that as of noon, the day that the Trump administration put the tariffs on everybody, which was at 4 p.m. on April 2nd. As of noon on that day, they still hadn’t really figured out the numbers or anything. And what they did is they took the trade deficit, divided it by how much the US exports.

And that gave us the number. It had no indication that they had even glanced at what actual real tariff levels were. They certainly hadn’t done a study of non-tariff barriers. They just took the one measure that Trump is obsessed with and made it a penalty. And so Vietnam got a 46%. Now, why did it go down this way?

Well, the first and most important thing to understand is that Trump has no help. It’s just him. Normally when someone spend some time out of power, they go through and recruit people who know things that they don’t know so that when they get back into power, they can hit the ground running, do some legislation, build up a system that will last beyond them.

Trump’s done none of that. He actually fired everybody in his inner and his outer circle who had anything to do with anything, including everyone within the Republican Party, within the apparatus, and just built a nice little cult of personality around himself. And now that he’s in the Oval Office, he’s built an Obama esque shell of incompetence around him, surrounding himself with people who literally don’t know what’s going on.

The two people who are most relevant to this conversation, we have a trade adviser for manufacturing called Peter Navarro. Navarro is an academic. He’s never actually worked with a company at any level. So everything that is in his mind on tariffs and trade and manufacturing is all stuff that he’s thought up and maybe studied, but never actually done in the real world.

And he has a particular bone to pick with Canada. So that explains where a lot of the vitriol has come from on that front. The second person is the Commerce secretary, a guy by the name of Howard Ludwick. And how, geez, did a little looking into this guy. A lot of people have a lot of strong opinions.

I think the nicest thing that I’ve ever heard anyone say about him is that he’s a Venal and craven. Anyway, he has earned a lot of enemies within even the upper echelons of the movement as being completely inflexible and completely immune to reality. And he has spent most of his time at Trump’s side basically telling Trump whatever he thinks Trump wants to hear. And so since he thinks Trump wants to hear about tariffs, he’s talking to Trump about how tariffs are such a great idea and how you have to make the numbers as large as possible.

They don’t have to be rude in actual relationships and everything like that. And then of course, remember below, these people, especially a lot like Donald Trump, cleared out the entire Commerce Department. So there’s no one who can even try to inform the president, through the Secretary of Commerce, about what is actually going on in the world. As to Vietnam, specifically, Vietnam’s tariff rate on average, product by product is about 9.5%.

And if you do it on a trade weighted basis. So whatever we trade more with, give that one more weight. It’s actually closer to 5%. It’s nowhere close to the 45%, that it is now. The reason it’s this high is because of the way the Trump administration manufactured the data that was necessary to give a high number.

And the reason it’s so high is because of a huge success in American economic and national security policymaking. You see, the Vietnamese hate the Chinese way more than we do. And when Covid hit, and we found ourselves with a lot of supply chain disruptions that were Chinese related, American firms went into Vietnam in a very big way to build industrial plant, to diversify supply chains away from China.

So in the last four years, we’ve seen a significant boost in exports out of Vietnam, specifically designed to cut China and Russia out of the loop. And the projects have been pretty successful. But in the short term, the Vietnamese aren’t wealthy yet, so they can’t afford to purchase American products. That manifests as a trade deficit. And the way that the Trump administration has made up the data, that means that they come in, looking pretty red.

So this is a great example of where you take a country, Vietnam, that is going to undoubtedly be part of the American economic and security future and make the process of making that reality as complicated, as painful as possible. Hopefully the Trump administration and the Vietnamese government are going to find a way to get through this real quick.

The problem, of course, with declaring success there is because the Trump administration’s data is literally manufactured. It can go whatever direction Donald Trump’s mood goes, and he’s got a couple of people whispering in his ears things that are both wrong, and are wildly misrepresented of the reality of the situation. So will it work? God knows.

This isn’t based in fact any more. It’s just a fantasy, and it is already causing an extreme amount of pain and unwinding several years of very successful efforts to move away from the Chinese system.

¡Ostia! Spain’s Economy Is Booming

The Spaniards have been on an economic hot streak as of late. So, what have they been doing right, and will this streak continue?

Spain has seen strong economic growth, a balanced budget, and business-friendly policies all contributing to the recent economic success. Actively seeking and welcoming immigrants has helped offset demographic decline, and the people entering the county have had an easier time integrating since they mostly hail from former Spanish colonies.

However, there’s a bulge in Spain’s demographics. This means that the economic boom they are seeing now will only last for another decade unless they can drive a million youths into the country each year. If Spain wants to secure its long-term future, it might have to start thinking about integrating with alternative systems, like NAFTA.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming from a chilly morning in Colorado. Today we’re talking about Spain a little bit. Spain is a country that has been in the news in a good way. That’s a nice change. For having relatively robust economic growth. Fairly good balance, getting this budget under control and a series of good, national policies that they’ve been put in place over the last 15 years that are actually serving it.

Well, economists kind of named it the country of the year, last year for the country that seemed to be doing the best. I don’t want to.

I don’t want to rain on the parade. But we need to put things in context. The two things that, the economist pointed out that the Spanish had done. Right. I broadly agree with number one. They’ve done a series of macroeconomic forms that have made it much easier to do business in Spain than it is in France or Italy or the United Kingdom or Germany.

And in doing so, it’s really unleashed the population to do more. And then second, they have a relatively open door immigration system. And so they’ve been able to, flush out their demographic structure in a very useful way. The country, based on whose statistics you’re using is somewhere around 15%, foreign born, with most of those people having moved in in the last 15 years.

That is pretty significant for a European nation state. These are real things. These do have legs, but I need to put that in context so you understand that this is not a long term fix. Number one, the Spanish demography is based like everyone else is on when they started to industrialize, when you move off the farm and into town, kids go from being free labor to an expense and you have fewer of them.

Well, the Spanish really got serious about industrializing in the 70s. And so they’ve got this population bulge among people who are in their 40s, and then it drops off precipitously below that. Part of the reason that the Spanish opened their doors to immigration was try to round out that lower section as much as they could. It was the right call.

Also, there’s the issue about whether or not this is replicable, and it probably isn’t because Spain used to have a hemisphere spanning empire. And so there are Spanish speakers of Spanish descent living throughout the Western Hemisphere. And it’s fairly easy for the Spanish mainland. The Spanish government, Spain proper, to import people from these former colonies with a minimum of cultural fuss.

This isn’t like France, where they’re bringing in Arabs. It isn’t like the United States, where we’re bringing in Hispanics. They are Hispanics who are bringing in other Hispanics. And the cultural lift for that is a lot less. Just keep in mind that if the Spanish want to continue to repair or just maintain their demographic structure, they’re going to have to bring in just shy of a million people a year who are under the age of 30 from now on.

And you do that for 2030 years and you change the culture quite a bit. In Spain, you don’t change it as much as everyone else. So that’s kind of piece one. Piece two is the nature of that demographic bulge itself. As a country ages as its demographics get older. It’s not all bad. It used to be when you have a lot of people that were 0 to 25, all those young people, there was a lot of consumption from the raising of the children.

And that generated a lot of inflation. That’s not Spain’s problem. Spain’s bulge is now in the late 30s to early 50s. So these are people who are, for the most part, childless. And all the money that they would have spent on their children are instead being spent on consumption. And so you’re going through basically a 25 year consumption boom in Spain that’s going to last at least another decade.

And that is very real. And it feels great because you get industrial growth, you get production growth, and you get consumption growth, but it’s a one shot deal. If anything happens to that lower age bracket that is now fueled almost entirely by immigration. We’ve seen things like this before. It’s happened in China, it’s happened in Korea, it’s happened in Germany.

And if you can’t round out that bottom tier, it’s a one shot deal. Now it’s a one shot deal. The last 25 to 30 years in the Spanish are in the middle of it. They should enjoy it. But the trick for them will be preparing for what’s next. Now, like the United States, that is 18 much more slowly than the European countries.

We are going to be able to look at everybody else who is so much more advanced on this and learn from their mistakes and their successes moving forward, and the Spanish are in a decent place to do that. But at the end of the day, they’re part of a currency union and a political union that is demographically spent, and they will need to find another path forward, not just in terms of their economic model, but their economic grouping.

Luckily, there is a potential answer on Dec. The Mexicans, from time to time of flirted with the idea of Spain joining NAFTA, and I got to say it would be a pretty clean fit. The demographics line up, the industrial bases are complementary and having a foothold in mainland Europe would not be a bad idea for the NAFTA countries.

India Complicates the US Fentanyl Crisis

The 2025 US threat assessment has revealed that India is now a significant source of precursor chemicals used in fentanyl production, alongside China.

Fentanyl is a synthetic and much easier to produce then cocaine, meaning just about anyone can do it. Trying to pressure supplier countries and crack down on drug labs doesn’t work with a substance like this. Since fentanyl precursors are legal, regulating them is tough and inspecting shipments is a losing battle. So, a new strategy will be needed.

The only effective long-term solution to this crisis is addressing demand and consumption within the US and given historical American drug policy…it’s going to require a lot of work.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a snowy, foggy morning in Colorado. Today we’re gonna talk about something that came out in the new 2025. And that’s American, threat assessment. And basically it says that some of the precursor materials that are being used for fentanyl are now not coming necessarily from China, but from India.

So quick backstory. Fentanyl, unlike cocaine, is a synthetic. It is manufactured rather than grown. And because of that, it takes about four man hours, 4 to 6 man hours to make a single dose of cocaine. Because you have to clear land, you have to grow the crop, you have to harvest the crop, you have to dry the crop.

You have to then process the crop and eventually ship it north. A lot of involvement because it’s an agricultural product. Not so with fentanyl. With fentanyl you get your pre precursor materials. You process those into something called a precursor material. Fancy. And then you basically cook the stuff in a lab for a week. And then you have several thousand, probably several tens of thousands of doses that you ship north.

It only takes a few man seconds to make a dose of fentanyl. The problem is twofold here, the way the United States has chosen to go after fentanyl is, number one, to try to put pressure on the countries that are providing the precursor materials. The issue is that one of these countries is China and the precursor materials are legal.

You use them in any number of things, from making installation to medicine. So you can’t like, not produce them. And it’s very easy for you to siphon off a very small amount to ship to the United States. So you’re talking about things that are measured in liters here. In fact, all of the precursors that were used to make all of the drugs, all the fentanyl that was intercepted at the U.S. border could fit into 33, oil drums.

It’s not a lot of material. Once this stuff gets to the United States, it’s repackaged and sent into Mexico, typically by just a pickup truck. And then it’s distributed to the drug labs, which are just little facilities about the size of your average garage, typically in your average garage, where the processed into the final drug and it’s shipped north.

And so what the U.S. does is it tries to convince the countries that are producing the precursors to not and it tries to convince the, countries that are have the drug labs to have better security. And it’s not that these are stupid plans, but they’re not going after the low hanging fruit. The low hanging fruit is how you shipped the stuff from China, the United States.

And that’s the post office. If you’ve got a decent scanning system for small parcels, you’d probably be able to cut that link. But even that isn’t going to do very much because the precursors are legal and they can come from anywhere. And this is where India’s getting on it. One of the things that we see whenever we’re fighting the drugs is we don’t get good data until it’s two years out of date.

And so two years ago, India didn’t make the radar at all. And the Biden administration and now the Trump administration are talking to the Chinese about trying to find out which Americans are doing this to crack down on the personnel. It’s probably the better way to do it. And in the meantime, you squeeze the balloon, it just pops up somewhere else where it’s legal.

And then, of course, the border crossing from Mexico to the United States isn’t really something that we can lock down. And even if we could, one liter of finished fentanyl is enough to create somewhere between 50 and 100,000 doses based on the purity. So all you need is one dude in a backpack to get through to supply the entire country for a couple of days.

And at the end of the day, there’s no reason that those labs need to be in Mexico any more than the precursor materials need to come from China. The stuff is ubiquitous. It doesn’t take much of a capital investment to set up operations, and you can do it in Kansas and just as much as you can do it in Mexico.

And for the precursors, you can do it in China, you can do it in India. You could do it in new Jersey. So, the only real way to get fentanyl under control, it would be to address the consumption side of the equation. And that has always been a flaw in American drug policy.

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

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