What’s Up with the Middle East: Syrian Dysfunction

Photo of a plaza and monument in Syria

Next up in the Middle East series is Syria. They’re enjoying a calm period right now, but the new President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is walking on eggshells to avoid the deep-rooted problems that have plagued Syria for ages.

Those problems run the gamut, from ethnic to religious to geographic divisions. Think of Syria as a patchwork of groups that love fighting with each other. And maintaining stability in a place like that is hard, especially now that backing from Russia and Iran no longer exists.

Unfortunately for the Syrians, nobody is all that interested in helping them out. Western powers aren’t willing to step in, regional powers benefit more from Syrian dysfunction, and the Gulf states can’t figure out how to proceed. All that to say, Syria should enjoy this period of calm, because the storm is undoubtedly coming back.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Zion National Park, going down the old Conservation Corps path that they blew out of the side of a mountain, because that’s how we did things in the 30s. Anyway, we’re continuing our Middle East week, and today we’re gonna talk about Syria. We have a new government that controls most of the territory and has incorporated most of the factions. 

But, don’t expect this to last. We’re at a kind of the calm before the storm. Basically the new leader whose name escapes me. Yeah, that looks right. Isn’t going to last. I mean, I wish him the best, but he basically has inherited all of Syria’s core problems without any of its advantages. Syria is made up of a half a dozen completely different regions, different sectarian groups, ethnic groups, different religions in different geographies, and they don’t pull together. 

So you have your Druze on the mountain down in the South. You’ve got the Arabs and what we would consider the Fertile Crescent, the three big cities of harm Ham, Aleppo, and then the fortress city of Damascus. You’ve got the Alawites and the Christians in the mountains and the coastal enclave in the northwest. And then you have the Kurds and the kind of step back territory along the Euphrates to the northeast. 

And then, of course, ISIS is running around like mad in the desert in the middle, in the war before now, all of these factions were at one another’s throats to some degree. There were limited alliances, at least within specific geographies, but there was really no way for the single government in Damascus to exercise the writ over the entire territory. 

That doesn’t change. What has changed is that two of the powers on the outside, the Russians and the Iranians, are no longer providing a and I say this tongue in cheek, a little bit a stabilizing influence. You see, the Iranians and the Russians were backing the, Damascus government of Bashar al-Assad. To the hilt with equipment, with men, whether it was, Russian fighter pilots or Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon that were controlled by Iran didn’t really matter. 

All of it, was funneling in to help the central government hold the line in the Civil War. Well, that’s obviously stopped because the central government fell. And this new guy is now in charge. But it’s not like anyone else is stepping up to help him. The big news recently is that the European Union and the United States have decided to drop sanctions on the Syrian government to kind of give them a chance, but they need a lot more than that if they’re going to go anywhere. 

Also, we’ve had so let’s just say, some weird political bedfellows in the last couple of weeks, Donald Trump actually met the new Syrian leaders and shook his hand. This is a guy who was executing civilians under Sharia law less than a year ago. So, you know, apparently we’re doing that now. But the United States and the European Union made it very clear that any aid, was far in the future and would be contingent on a large number of factors that are mostly out of side of the central government’s control. 

So the Civil War is kind of at a pause, but don’t expect that to last. Oh, that’s kind of steep. We might hug the side a little bit more. The other players that would matter. You got two local and then two further abroad. The two that are local are the Turks and the Israelis. And they’re okay having Syria as a more or less failed state right on the doorstep, because it means that they can go in there and do whatever they want, bomb whoever they want, go after whatever surgeons they don’t like. 

Which in the case of the Turks, in the case of the Turks, it’s the Kurds who are America’s best friends in the region. And in the case of the Israelis, it’s pretty much anyone but the Druze. So if Syria was to consolidate into a functional state, they’d be able to resist these sort of punches. And the Israelis and the Turks are just fine the way things are right now. 

So having a semi failed government and a semi anarchic system that spins up its own internal violence for its own reasons, this is fine. Further abroad, the two big players. Well, this is called a cluster of players. The Gulf states of the Persian Gulf. Since most notably, the three most heavily involved are Saudi Arabia, which tends to support the Sunnis, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, who are a little bit more freeform with their assistance. 

The three powers do not see things the same way. They backed different factions at different times for different reasons. And now that everything’s kind of in flux, they’re kind of sitting on their hands. Funny thing, when Donald Trump was going on his, make up of terrorists, campaign in the Middle East, he stopped in Saudi Arabia and basically asked for cash to invest into the American economy because the American economy is slipping into a recession that Donald Trump’s tariff policies have cost. 

And the Saudis basically said, yeah, you know, you’ll make up whatever number you want in your PR campaign. We’re not going to give you even a third of that. And we’re not giving anything to, Syria that is not specifically backing our interests until such time that you come up with the security plan for the place. So everyone’s just kind of sitting on their hands and waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

And in Syria, you probably will not have to wait soon. Just keep in mind that should this new government actually start to consolidate the two countries that are closest with the most military forces available and the most to lose, Turkey and Israel are certain to take actions. So anarchy. So I formed anarchy is probably the best. We’re going to get. 

And if it lasts through the summer, I would be very, very, very surprised.

What’s Up with the Middle East: Turkish Dominance

Image of a line of Turkey Flags with kids riding on the back of a tram in Istanbul

We’re moving onto the region’s most dominant country – Turkey. Sitting at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, Turkey’s military, economy, and political identity have all been shaped by this unique identity.

As deglobalization sets in, Turkey (and more specifically, President Erdoğan) is keen on seizing an opportunity at climbing the regional ladder. Thanks to solid geography, good demographics, and a long history of outlasting regional upheaval, the Turks have the perfect foundation. All Erdoğan feels he must do is continue consolidating power, amend the constitution, and his seat at the table will be cemented for the remainder of his life. And then he can project his ‘image’ of society onto the wider region.

It’s not all butterflies and rainbows for Turkey though. They’ll need to continue growing the industrial base to be globally competitive. And some of those outdated economic views could harm Turkey’s long-term prospects, despite the deglobalized world we’re heading towards.

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Transcript

Forthcoming….

What’s Up In the Middle East: Israel’s Future

Photo of Israeli flag in from of some buildings

We’re kicking off a short new series on the Middle East. Of course, we must begin with the country on everyone’s mind – Israel.

The Israeli government is a fragile conglomerate of coalitions that have been led (and weakened) by Benjamin Netanyahu over the past decades. Netanyahu has managed to piss off Trump in recent times as well, with his requests for freedom to operate in Gaza, removal of US tariffs, and US strikes on Iran; Trump was quick to reject all three. But Netanyahu did get something from Trump – a nice seat at the top of his s**t list.

The situation in Gaza remains unsolved and is as complicated as ever. The US is disengaging from the Middle East, which means Israel is going to have to find someone else who carries a big stick and can help ensure its strategic future. Given Israeli reliance on imports food, energy, and tech, Turkey is the best option…despite the hoops and hurdles they’ll need to jump through and around to make it happen.

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Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here come to you from Zion National Park. We’re launching off a week in the Middle East today. And, as seems appropriate, when I. You’re in Zion, we’ll start by talking about what some people call the Zionist state, Israel. Israel is a multi-party democracy, that hasn’t had a majority government in years. 

This is not an electoral system like the United States, where if you get one more vote than the other guy, you get the seat. And and you knew if you get a certain percentage of the votes, you get a certain percentage of the seats. So we’ve got like 11 parties in the Israeli, parliament right now. And as a result, for the last 30 years, their governments have been, very weak because they have to, make all of their coalition partners happy. 

Because if a coalition partner leaves odds are you’re going to have a fresh election and you get started all over again. So, it’s a lot like how Italy used to be in the 60s, 70s and 80s and 90s and 90s. Now, in Israel, where governments very, very rarely last out their whole term. The guy in charge is Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been near or at the top of the Israeli political heap now for pushing almost 30 years, almost 40, not a long time, anyway. 

He is a populist conservative who has no problem throwing other people under the bus or sacrificing some of his, political, preferences in order to maintain power. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a condescending or condemning way. When you’ve got multiple parties in Parliament and multiple parties in your government, you have to make a lot of horse trades on a tactical basis day by day. 

And that means that a lot of the things you do care about get pushed to the side. And that’s part of his problem right now. Donald Trump, entertained Netanyahu at the white House a few weeks ago, and it went horrible, really. The only world leader who’s been to the white House since Trump has been in that had a worse time was Zelenskyy of Ukraine. 

If you remember, that ambush. Anyway, Netanyahu came asking for three things. Number one, he wanted a completely a free hand in Gaza to do whatever he wanted. Reminder that Gaza is that little strip of territory, that until recently was ruled by a militant political group called Hamas, kidnaped hundreds of Israelis still are holding a couple hundred of them. 

And the Israelis have now been spending about a year and a half trying to beat that and into some sort of shape that they actually think they can deal with in the long run. The second thing that Israel wanted was an end to tariffs. Trump put tariffs on pretty much everybody who wasn’t Russia And the Israeli project in many ways has been American subsidized since the beginning, back in 1948. And so the idea that the United States is now going to charge a pretty hefty, tariff, you can see Israeli’s really caught everyone of all political stripes and Israel off guard because they thought that Trump, being a populist conservative, was one of theirs. 

Apparently not to the degree that they thought. And then third, Netanyahu really wanted to get, Trump to bomb Iran into the Stone age and do Israel’s work for it. It didn’t go well. He basically got a firm, loud Trumpian no. One, all three. And, you know, there’s a lot of speculation on a lot of sides as to how this is going to shake out. 

But what it feels like to me is that, Trump has just done, what, the entire alliance structure. It’s not just the Germans or the Brits or the Australians. It’s everybody. And that includes Israel. And so the Israelis are learning that even when they have the most populist conservative government in decades, and the Americans have the most populist conservative government in literally centuries, they do not see eye to eye. 

And from Trump’s point of view, the problem appears to be Netanyahu. The way Trump sees the world, which is through a very specific lens that I would argue needs to be replaced, Netanyahu represents everything that Trump looks down on, came to the white House and he asked for things. That’s not what winners do. That’s what losers do. 

He hasn’t been able to clean up Gaza. And it’s been a year and a half. Why is this still going on? It’s entirely unfair. You’ve got over 2 million people basically living on a postage stamp. The idea that’s going to be anything other than a breeding ground for insurgency is silly, and there is no good solution for Gaza. 

You want to ship the Gazans somewhere else where apparently people are starting to talk about sending them into the middle of the desert in Libya. Now, whatever. There’s no infrastructure to move them. There’s no place that can take 2 million people in the Middle East anywhere, even including in the rich places. But Israel wants them gone. 

And Trump wonders why this hasn’t been settled on the tariff situation. You know, the Trump view that the world has been ripping off the United States economically. I have no respect for that. That’s just flat out wrong. We basically paid people to be on our sides for the Cold War. So we got something in return. We got security control. 

Israel, Israel’s different, Israel has basically occupied a soft spot in the American strategic formula. Since foundation. And when they say come after our IP, like the Chinese or the French do, we really don’t do a lot about it because we’re trying to make sure that Israel can exist as an island of democracy in a sea of problems.  

Anyway, so there was no change on the tariff situation. Third up is Iran. And while the Trump administration and Trump personally talks a big talk on Iran, Trump has made it very clear over and over and over again in both this administration in his first one, that he has no intention of getting involved in a meaningful war. 

I mean, he picked a fight with the Yemeni recently and then stopped after 30 days. And now the idea that the United States is going to get involved in a knock them out fight with a country that can influence militants across the entire region seems a bit of a stretch to me. Also, the Israelis very clearly have been pushing for the United States to do this long before Trump going back, five presidents. 

And it hasn’t really gone the way that the Israelis would like. And so when Netanyahu made his direct, almost arrogant plea to Trump, he was turned down flat. That doesn’t mean that the Americans and the Iranians are about to, like, kiss and make up. But Trump really does want a nominal deal that would allow him to say that he made a deal. 

And so those talks are continuing to grind forward. The bottom line is that Netanyahu can’t give Trump anything that he wants. Number one, there’s not a lot in the Middle East that the United States does want, especially now that the withdrawal after Iraq has been completed. And then second, anything that might produce movement of, for example, peace in Gaza, which is one of the things that, Trump campaigned on can only happen by rupturing Netanyahu, whose domestic political coalition because by the tenor of the right wing in Israel, Donald Trump is a hippie 

commie. And there’s just no version of any deal, in Gaza that would work. For who? This is nice. Let’s take a look at that. That would work for all of the factions. In fact, there are some members of Netanyahu’s coalition who are wondering why they haven’t kicked up the crematoria and just gotten rid of the Gazans directly. 

Anyway, so that’s where Israel is. That’s where Netanyahu is. He’s kind of stuck in a lurch. There’s no real good move for him. And Trump is tuning out. And that means the Israelis are going to have to figure out how to function in a world where the United States just really doesn’t care about the Middle East. 

So, obviously this has happened under Team Trump, but I would have argued that we’ve been edging this direction for a good 15 years already, and we’re always going to get to some version of this where the Israelis have to figure out that they can’t look after the security themselves. They’re too small, they’re too dependent on energy imports, the two independent food imports, the two dependent on technology imports. 

But there are partners out there that might work. They just have to figure out which one they can stomach. And the one that is most obvious, the one that is closest to one that could be a threat if it wasn’t a partner would be Turkey. And we’ll talk about them tomorrow.

The Future of Tourism: Part 2

Photo of tourists in Europe

We’re continuing our discussion on the future of tourism with a few new regions. Today we’ll be looking at some at-risk European countries, an unstable Middle East, and an uneven Southeast Asia.

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Transcript

Okay. Next is Europe. Europe faces two situations as well. The first is clearly demographic, with countries like Germany and Italy just aging into obsolescence. You’re looking at the complete collapse of their industrial model over the next decade, which will take the entire social model with it, because without people to pay for the welfare state, oh, angry Germans, who are willing to protest and get sketchy, of course they’re going to be really old. 

So it’s not going to have the same connotations that it might have, say, 50 years ago. The other piece of the equation. Yes. So, you know, got steep wobbling, financial collapse, industrial collapse, employment collapse. And on the other side, you’ve got the Russians who are going to push until the day that they can’t, obviously, unless you are into adventure tourism. 

Russia and Ukraine are already out of the tourist list. And if the Russians are successful in Ukraine, they will push further west. The whole line of states, going roughly from Estonia down to Bulgaria are in some degree of danger, which means that all of them, all of a sudden become only the type of tourist locations that very specific types of tourists go to. 

So if there’s anywhere in Central Europe that you are interested in now is absolutely the time. 

All right, let’s see. Next up, the Middle East. Who? Everyone in the Middle East basically falls into one of three categories. Either they rely on oil income directly. Number two, they rely on oil income indirectly from another state, or they are Israel. All three of these categories look kind of sketchy. Oil requires a significant trans national trans oceanic transport system. 

In any system where globalization is no longer a thing and no one is providing security on the water that is in danger. So the only oil producers that will continue to be oil producers are those that both can maintain control at home. Short list there, as well as cut a deal with a local or regional security guarantor in order to keep everything running from the oil point of view. 

To get to an end user that eliminates sales to places like Japan or Korea, Taiwan or China, which is kind of the bread and butter for most of the Persian Gulf countries right now. So this gets really dicey really fast. The North African say Algeria have a much better position because they just have to get over to Europe. 

But for the countries that are on the dole, you know, whether you are Morocco or Jordan or Yemen, the money’s just going to stop coming. So you should really count on that going away. And that just leaves Israel. Now, Israel imports three quarters of food, imports 90% of its energy, and there is no version of economic transformation that Israel is capable of where those two things go away. 

So the only way Israel continues to be a viable state, especially if it’s going to be a tourism destination, is if it manages to cut a deal with a new regional security guarantor. That will not be the United States. The U.S. won’t have the reach of the interest that will be Turkey. So watch Turkey very closely for the next decade. 

It’s probably going to be one of the fastest growing, most successful, most powerful countries, not just in the region, but in the world for decades to come. And how Israel makes its bed with the Turks will determine everything about the sustainability of the Jewish state. 

And finally, Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is the part of the world that I expect to do the best. Is the world to globalize after, of course, a little adjustment period, because it can pick up anything that the Chinese drop and has the perfect mix of demographic structure, geographic accessibility, a history of basically not going to war with itself. 

It’s going to be a manufacturing powerhouse and kind of a globalization in miniature that the ten countries that are in the area, but not everything is the same for everybody. Some countries are going to do better than others. And kind of like with India, when you change the economic profile of a country really dramatically, you have people who win more than others. 

And that will be nowhere more extreme in terms of differences than in Southeast Asia. So what will be true for Luzon and Java and Bangkok and ho Chi Minh City and, Hanoi will not be true for Mindanao or Sumatra or Lao or other places that are a lot poorer. Basically, you have this huge split within the region, and then among the region between the countries and the locations that can do very, very well in this sort of environment. 

And those it can’t. And so, you know, this is going to sound really strange, of course, but when you want to go to another country, you need to do your homework first. And in the future, Southeast Asia is going to offer both the best and the worst.

The Future of Tourism: Part 1

Photo of tourists in Brazil

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll know that I take my travel very seriously. Unfortunately, it seems that my work keeps crawling its way into my personal life, because deglobalization is changing tourism as we know it.

Global tourism will decline; I suppose that’s a no-brainer if global trade and relationships start to breakdown. But the collapse of China could have an outsized impact on the developing world and tourism to these countries.

India is poised for long-term success, but the coming years will likely be much more unstable, making tourism in India less appealing in the coming years. Brazil is a country heavily integrated with China, and if that stops, the Brazilians will be looking at economic and social collapse. Which means Brazil will also be much less attractive for tourists.

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Transcript

Hello, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from arches. Today, since I’m on vacation, kind of, we’re gonna talk about tourism. The places you need to go while you still can. We are going through a period of massive economic change globally where demographics are basically smashing the old model before you even consider what’s happening in the United States with the globalization and populism. 

And the end result is there are a lot of countries that people like to think that they want to visit that aren’t going to be options for much longer. So the point of this video is to give you an idea of where you should prioritize, because time is very, very limited. 

All right. Quick reminder of what everybody is up against with globalization. Global trade is obviously going to collapse. That reduces access to things like finance and energy and food products. And so you’re looking for long term stability for a place does it doesn’t have the, the beauty that you’re after, physical or cultural, whatever happens to be, but has the ability to maintain a degree of stability itself. 

Big part of this is going to be when China collapses, which is not far off. A lot of the Chinese money that has been flooding into specifically the developing world to fund things, is going to go away. Keep in mind that a lot of the things that Chinese are funded were never funded before, because they were not necessarily great investment options. 

The Chinese view money as a political good. That’s why their money supply is so huge. Anyway, first country we have to talk about is India. India is a country that overall, I think is going to come out on the positive side of the globalization trend. But India is a big place with over a billion people. And to think that they’re going to go through a massive industrialization process that’s going to double their industrial plant and adapt to the collapse of China as a source of consumer goods and collapse to the international trade system, which has allowed them to reach out, without massive social upheaval, is being overly optimistic. 

India will still be there. India is actually probably going to be entering one of its greatest growth periods in its history, and India has been around a long time, but they’re going to be a lot of growing pains, and that’s going to generate a lot of social stress, which is going to change the profile of what you would do for tourism in India. 

Next up is Brazil. Brazil has a lot more exposure to the trends that are coming, and it’s a very high dollar producer for agricultural commodities because it needs so many inputs, most of which come from a different continent. So if anything happens to globalization, they lose access to those inputs on a reliable basis, and a lot of the land goes follow because it just has no innate fertility. 

In addition, they suffered a double blow from the Chinese number one. They’re one of the top investment targets for the Chinese who are trying to get that agricultural product to China. And without that investment, you should expect infrastructure spending to basically come to a standstill. And secondly, back in the 2000s under the Lula government, the Chinese formed all kinds of joint ventures with the Brazilians, which basically meant that they went into Brazil to set up joint production facilities, but they stole absolutely everything that wasn’t locked down, most notably, the intellectual property took it back to China, produced it at a bigger scale, and drove all of Brazilian industry out of business. So Brazil today has basically become a two horse economy, high cost agricultural product, high cost, industrial inputs such as iron ore, all of it underwritten by the Chinese that all goes away, which means that Brazil will have to absolutely invent itself again. 

That’s going to be, at best, a 30 year process. And in the meantime, the social breakdown and the economic breakdown that is going to plague the country is going to be immense, meaning that there aren’t going to be a lot of places in Brazil that are really worth going to. But the Copacabana, right on the beach is kind of the quintessential expression of Brazilian economic inequality. 

You basically have these really, really rich pockets that will still be beautiful and they’ll be surrounded by slums. For those of you who have been to Brazil before, you notice that that is not exactly a new concept, but it’s going to become much more concentrated and the disparities will be much more obvious.