Peter Zeihan, Author at Zeihan on Geopolitics

Trump Takes on Washington

Second-time freshman President Donald J Trump is taking the axe to the federal workforce. Or at least he is attempting to. Like presidents before him Trump is discovering that America’s separation of powers does not enable a president to bypass the will of Congress or the role of the courts. Instead, he is burning through large volumes of his political capital to achieve fairly paltry results.

Does this mean the old/new president is down and out? Hardly. It just means he will have a bigger impact on people who are not protected by American laws and the American Constitution. It’s in the wider world where there is little to stop him.

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.

Generational Divides of Other Countries

An elder woman plays basketball with a child

I’ve talked extensively about the generational divides in the US, but what about other countries? Let’s look at the unique demographic trends in Russia, China, and Iran.

We all know the US generations – Boomers to Zoomers – but that model can’t be applied everywhere. Russia is more so divided by major political events, like the Brezhnev era or the Putin era. In China, the primary divide is pre and post One-Child Policy, where instability and famine ruled before and economic boom occurred after (the younger gen now faces economic downturn, high costs, and Xi). In Iran, the main split is the 1979 Islamic Revolution, where those before and after have very different perceptions of the country, leaders, religion, and more.

The main takeaway is that each country has unique political and economic events that have shaped generational divides. While the US model helps breakdown domestic trends, we can’t use that framework for everyone.

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 to you from the southern headlands of the Wanganui Inlet on the northwest coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page on, demographic specifically, that I talk about Gen-X and the boomers, the millennials and all that of the United States quite a bit. What about the generational blocks for other countries, specifically Iran, China and Russia?

There’s a little bit of a danger here because all demographic lines are a bit artificial. So the ones I use for the United States, specifically people who were born between 1946 and 1964, in the United States. Those are my boomers. These are people who were, born in the post-World War Two boom years in very large numbers.

And as they went through their childhood and adult lives, they’ve basically remade American culture in their image after them. 1965 to 1979, roughly. You have, Gen X. That’s my generation. Birthrates dropped off precipitously. One of the reasons the boomers were so many is you still had some old gender norms. By the time you get to Gen X, their parents had become a little bit more, I mean, the female revolution happened in there.

Dropped the birthrate a little bit. The suburbs had already been largely populated, dropped the birthrate a little bit, raised cost of living. Drop the birthrate a little bit, a little bit. Energy prices, all that good stuff. So Gen X until recently, was the smallest generation in American history. After that, you got the millennials born roughly 1980 until 1999.

These are the kids who had never seen or remember seen a, circular phone and basically were the generation that made the transition to a digital world. And then the Zoomers, kids who were born since 2000 are the ones who were, doing penpal emails rather than written correspondence and have never looked back. All right. Like I said, it’s a little artificial.

Whenever you’re looking to another country, you need to look at the gross economic trends, and physical conflicts that have shaped their worlds, because oftentimes you’re not going to draw the lines in the same place. So, for example, if you’re going to look at Europe, there is a boomer generation in about the same window for about the same, reasons, but because the cost of living was so much higher and because Europe is so much more urbanized.

They didn’t have a lot of kids. So American boomers had the millennials, the European boomers did not. And so the demographics just kind of fall apart after the 1960s. So you got to be careful about how many trendlines. You try to extend. So, for example, in the case of the Russians, the really definitive break is pre and post Brezhnev for when your adult life was because if you were born and had a memory of Brezhnev years, you remember how bad central planning can be and you were probably a little bit more open things like perestroika and glasnost.

But then when you get into the post-Soviet system, you got an equally bad thing to compare to. So Brezhnev, stagnation, economic doldrums, post-Cold War collapse, democracy for you probably equals chaos. And so you’ve always known that there’s or always felt in your gut that there’s a choice between stagnancy but stability and opportunity, but free fall. And it’s not a pretty choice.

But if you were born just a little bit later, then you have no political memory of life under the Soviet Union. You may remember the free fall of the 1990s, but then for the next 25 years, Vladimir Putin, despite his many, many, many flaws, has been leader. And Russia has been relatively stable from an economic point of view for that entire time, and especially if your first adult memories are post 2000.

You don’t know a life without Vladimir Putin. And yet that’s everybody under age 40 in Russia today. So it’s not really a boomer or millennial zoomer kind of thing. It’s a Brezhnev issue. It’s a Putin issue. It’s a fall of the Soviet Union issue about where you draw the lines. Now, something to keep in mind is the freshness generation was the last one to really have kids in numbers.

We had a little blip during perestroika when people thought that the Soviet Union could be reformed, but it didn’t last. And since then, the birthrate has just been awful. So the generation that has been growing up since 2000, in Russia, you know, the the millennials and the the Zoomers of Russia, if you will, are really the last generation that is going to exist and significant enough number to make anything happen in Russia.

And so what they do from their small numbers will shape a large part of a continent for the rest of the century as they die out. All right. What else? China. Hu. Okay. China. It’s a little bit simpler. It’s pretty. And post one child policy. If you’re born before the one child policy kicked in, you know, famine, you know, a lack of electricity, you know, outdoor plumbing, and you know that the world can be a very nasty place.

You also know political leadership that is murderous and mercurial. And you yearn for something better if you were post one child, not only was there a floor put under the chaos, but the internationalization of the Chinese system after Mao, generated a degree of economic opportunity that had never existed. Now, part of this is indeed policy, because it was after Mao that you got things like roads and electricity and meaningful amounts of steel and high rises and health care and all the other things that go with modern life.

But having only one child means for grandparents support, two parent support, one grandchildren and those grandchildren. The people who were born in the later decades, you know, 1990 and after, they have no nothing but an economic boom because all of the wealth of the country has been focused on industrial expansion, and there has not been a large generation from below that needs to be clothed, fed and educated.

So all of the social spending that was done in China was spent on very few people, relatively speaking, and you were one of them. So for young Chinese, it’s been glorious until the system started to break about seven years ago. And now we’ve got all the worst aspects of capitalism, things like, conspiracy theories throughout the public space, massive amounts of shell games, real estate booms and that have not yet gone bust.

Putting the money into the wrong things over investment, but no longer investment that generates growth when you do investment on the front end, when you don’t have roads or power lines, you get roads and power lines, and that’s great. But if you start with roads and power lines and you do a lot of state investment, you’re just building more roads and power lines and you only need so many of those.

So the lesson that the Japanese learned in the 1990s and 2000, the Chinese have now learned it as well. And so the Chinese need to adapt to a new economic model, but they’re still dealing with the distortions of the old capitalized, over invested system. So if you’re a 20 something Chinese citizen today, you’re of a small generation.

You hear the stories from your parents about how good things got, how fast it got, how stable it was. But everything has too much money chasing too few goods within the country, and everything is too expensive. So your chances of ever starting a family are nil. Your chances of ever being able to afford an apartment, much less a house, are almost nonexistent.

And it’s a very different political view. And if you were to put a label on it, these would be the zoomers of the Chinese system. And they are the last generation that will grow up in a centralized China, and they will definitely have some visceral memories 20, 30 years from now about how the Chinese system crashed around them.

And no one could seem to do anything because the political system is too ossified to function. Those people are going to be making some very interesting political and personal decisions as the system fails. Because if there’s anything we know about Chinese history in the past, when the center breaks, people leave if they can and a country that has at least 800 million people, that’s like the low end for estimates and maybe as many as 1.2 billion, if only 5% of them get out.

You’re still talking about the greatest migrant surges in human history. All right. That just leaves Iran. And Iran’s is even simpler. Yet it all depends upon how old you were when the Shah fell. And the mullahs took over and close to the water here. We’re going to turn around. There we go. Okay. This is just a really cool pocket beach.

I found. You practically have to repel down to it. Okay. Iran. So if you were are old enough to remember Iran as an adult before 1979. So you’re in your 60s for this category. The boomers, if you will. You remember just how corrupt the Shah was, but how there was opportunity for anyone with an education up to and including women.

And then the Shah fell and the mullahs took over. Women were disenfranchized and the intelligentsia and the engineers and everybody with a set of skills who could left the country. The people who left the country tended to have the money, and they emptied out the inner cities. Sorry. Inner cities in Iran, not the same as inner cities.

And like Chicago, you’re they emptied out the wealthier parts of Iran’s cities, took their money, took their kids, took their skill set and left. And you had a 15 year period where Iran was basically drowning and an inability to function because it didn’t have the skill set anymore. It had lost most of its educated youth, and most of the efforts the Iranian government, past and present, had made to educate another generation left the country and instead they had eight years of a grinding war with Iraq.

And after that, a series of on again, off again confrontations with the United States. Now, if you fast forward a little bit to a break point of around whole 2008, 2010, you had a shift in government with, the rise of a guy by the name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or a dog, as we used to call him at my old job, and a man at a job, was the first leader of Iran who was not a cleric since the fall of the Shah.

And he was deeply conservative, and he was deeply anti-American and anti-Western. But he wasn’t a man of the cloth. And he thought there should be room in public life for people who didn’t go to seminary, to be perfectly blunt. And so there’s now a split in Iranian society between the mullahs. On one hand, these conservatives who are, secular on the other hand, and then a wider disenfranchized group who has to basically take whatever’s on offer.

And that has made the country significantly more politically unstable. And in light of ongoing hostility with not just the United States, but the Western world in general, significantly less well off, because one of the mistakes that Ahmadinejad made is in order to get people over onto his side versus the clerics, he just bribed everybody. And so the state budget exploded, debt exploded, the currency crashed.

And then when a new round of sanctions came in and they could no longer underwrite everything, it all went to hell. Now we even have the strategic steps that the Iranians have taken to spawn paramilitary groups around the world falling apart. And so all of the money that Iran has spent on political consolidation, political evolution, education and increasingly strategic cost have all gone to nothing.

And so if you were 20, 15 years ago, for the last 15 years, your entire adult life, you have simply seen one state failure after another out of Tehran and you start to get a little pissed off. I’m not going to say anything simplistic like Iran is poised for a revolution or is ripe for change. What I’m saying is that the old pillars of stability that allow it to function don’t exist in the young adult generation, and that is a very nasty combination of factors.

Because remember when the old people who lived under the Shah left, they took the kids with them. We had a 20 year baby bust in Iran. So this younger generation is Disenfranchized is angry and is poor, relatively speaking, to Iran’s long history that that can turn violent very, very quickly, even if it doesn’t generate political change. So bottom line, there’s a generational story everywhere, but in before you can tell it, you have to really look at the local history and the economic trends that have shaped the people have grown in that areas.

It’s not going to be a cut and dried. It’s going to be different everywhere. But there is definitely lessons to learn. Okay. That’s it.

Can Tariffs Replace Income Taxes?

An AI generated image of connex boxes with American and Chinese flags on them

Imagine never paying income tax again. Sounds damn nice to me too. That’s until reality kicks in and you start looking at the math on how large the tariffs would need to be to replace those taxes…

Tariffs on imported goods would need to be roughly 50-65% and you could imagine the fallout that would have. Trade with key partners would collapse, prices would surge, supply chains would be disrupted, and energy supplies would take a hit. Tariffs once worked as a revenue source for the US, but with all the current programs and expenses, they barely scratch the surface.

In theory, there could be a way to make this work; like implementing entitlement programs, so a lower tariff would suffice. However, that would require some massive political changes that the US just isn’t ready for.

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 windy Colorado. We’re taking a couple of questions from the Patreon page today, specifically. A lot of talk in Washington these days is about replacing all income taxes with import tariffs. Is this possible? What do you think about what it would look like? Great question. The proposal dates back to something that predates the income tax, which was really adopted only about a century ago.

But you have to keep in mind the volumes in question. Today, the United States imports about 1.14. trillion dollars of goods and services, about, three quarters of that as goods. And the tax generates about 2.6 to $2.7 trillion of income. So if your goal is to zero out the income tax, you need a tariff on everything, not just from China, everything that is in the range of 50 to 65%.

I guarantee you, if you increase the price of things by half, it’s going to change how we live. For example, we bring in a lot of Canadian crude, heavy stuff that is then refined into, distillates such as gasoline and diesel, which are the primary fuel source for most of, say, the Midwestern part of the United States. That would go to zero almost overnight with a 50% increase. So we’d have lots of reshuffling. We’d have to basically shut down trade relations with all of our major countries that participate. Link supply chains with us. And, anything that is electronic come to Asia would get very expensive.

So you’d have some big impacts. The reason why you’d have this, such as mismatches. We don’t have the same economy that we had back during the times in the 1800s, when tariffs were our primary source of income. So we have built out the social welfare state with Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense now being our four biggest line items in the government.

So if you were to zero out Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, then you could perhaps talk about doing an equalization with a tariff that’s only around 20 or 30%. But I would argue that that would require a lot of political evolutions in the United States that we are not quite ready to cope with at the moment. So it’s an interesting idea, but as a, as an income tax eliminator, we’re nowhere near to tariffs, being the solution to that particular problem.

Russia After Russia

Building on yesterday’s video, we’ll be talking about the future of Russia following its collapse. So, what can we expect the Russia after Russia to look like?

Russia’s stockpile of weapons and tech is being drained in Ukraine and the leftovers won’t be of interest to other countries, so military tech in Russia is on its last leg. Most of the skilled labor would leave and it wouldn’t be surprising if security/intelligence personnel turned to crime. Disruptions to resource extraction and agriculture would likely cause an economic meltdown. Minority groups would make a push for independence. And of course, you should expect to see plenty of countries attempt to reclaim old land or try to command influence.

Regardless of how the Ukraine War plays out, Russia is on borrowed time. As the clock counts down, we will certainly see a reshaping of European geopolitics.

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 coming to you from Bell Block. Today we’re taking an entry from the Ask Peter forum on the Patreon page. And specifically, what would I anticipate? The former Soviet space must be the Russian space to look like in the aftermath of a Russian collapse. Before I get into the details of that, let me emphasize that I don’t see this happening this year or next year or anytime this decade.

The Russian demographics are horrid, and the war in Ukraine is not going well. And I do certainly expect to see a Russian collapse in my lifetime. But that doesn’t mean it’s just around the corner. We have to see a political break in Russia where the Putin regime fails. And since Putin has basically gutted the system of anyone who is theoretically capable of replacing him, we will then have a leadership struggle and probably a civil conflict that ends in national collapse.

That’s not imminent. Barring a massive, military defeat in Ukraine in the near term. Anyway, with that said, here’s how it goes.

We are taking an entry from the Ask Peter forum on the Patreon page today. And it says With Russia and demographic collapse, what does the post Russian space look like? Are the countries moving in or are there things we need to worry about? And the short answer is yes, those things.

Let’s start with the easy stuff. When an empire dies, when a country dies, there are certain parts of it that live on in another form. That was certainly true of the Soviet Union. And that will be true of post-Soviet Russia as well. So, first of all, the technology, Russia has been a military power for quite some time.

During the Cold War, they were clearly the second most powerful military in the world. But as you’ve noticed in the Ukraine war, the shine has come off. And Russia’s ability to produce at scale, its own technology has been proven to be woefully lacking. They’re more advanced tanks that can only make one at a time. They’re more advanced jets.

They’ve only made a dozen in total in the last 15 years. So the capacity of that to be transferred to another power is very limited. We’ve discovered over the course of the past few years that the Chinese aren’t sophisticated enough to copy the more advanced stuff and all the countries that have the technical skills to do it.

Places like Poland or Ukraine or the Czech Republic or Hungary, would rather work with Western technology, which is more effective, advanced, has higher range and lethality rates and all that good stuff. So If it isn’t been built already, it’s not something that I really worry about because all of the industrial plant that the Russians have simply is wildly inefficient.

They can’t staff at themselves. And everyone who could staff it would rather work with something that’s better. So for most of the military hardware, this is just going to fade away pretty quickly. Also keep in mind that the Russians are burning through everything that they can make in the Ukraine war. So it’s not like there’s going to be a big stock of modern war, material that anyone else could pick up and run with.

Which brings us to the second point. The skilled labor. Even with a million men fleeing the country in, the aftermath at the beginning of the war and even with the Russians having lost somewhere between 300,000 and 800,000 men since then, you know, data varies wildly based on your propaganda story. There are still a lot of Russians that have technical skills.

Now, this is something we know exactly what to look for, because it’s already happened after the Soviet collapse. Somewhere around 10 million, Russians, most of them with more advanced degrees, left the country and never returned. And we’re probably going to see something like that again. But it won’t be nearly as dramatic as last time, because there are no longer 10 million people with advanced degrees left in the country.

The Russian educational system collapsed. Technical educational system collapsed, actually, before the Soviet Union collapsed. And there was never rebuilt. Post-Soviet. So we’re only talking about a low single digit million number of people who could even theoretically leave in the first place that have a skill sets are relevant. And since those skill sets, for the most part atrophied under the post Russian system, under Putin, they won’t have nearly the impulse for growth or activity, that the original one did 35 years ago.

So noticeable, but not huge. And that includes people from the intelligence services who might go into business for themselves. Now, if you guys remember back to the early 1990s, there were a lot of movies where the bad guys were former Russian intelligence agents, former Central European intelligence agents and former South African intelligence agents.

And that really did reflect reality, because you had these giant institutions that were built on domestic control with the personnel to go with them, that all absconded and went into crime for themselves. Around the world. Now that will definitely happen again. But just like with the more technically minded folks, the pool is a lot smaller. It’s going to be more akin to what’s happening with the Syrian dissolution.

It’s the people who maintain security in Russia today are not the FBI technocrats that existed 40 years ago. They’re more like the thugs of Syria. People who, in order to pursue their own power, have decided to take their skill set and go elsewhere. But they’re not good at signals intelligence. They don’t have the connections around the world. But the old Soviet operators or South African operators had.

So basically, you’re just going to get a bunch of sociopaths who are going to head out and try business for themselves. And to be perfectly blunt, if you were good at that, you would have done it in the 90s. And Putin’s system is not like the Soviet system, which was based more or less on meritocracy. It’s more based on a Trumpian sense of loyalty to a person, and that is not a particularly marketable skill once the ship goes down.

So that takes care of the stuff that can leave. What about the stuff that stays? Russia is arguably the most resource rich country in human history. It is an absolutely massive place. And even in the best of times, huge swaths of the territory are empty. And that is so much more true now than it was during the Soviet times.

During the Soviet times, you had your primary cities of Moscow and Petersburg, and then you had a wave of secondary cities, and then you had the countryside. What we have seen in the post-Soviet collapse is the countryside. People have left to go to the secondary cities. The secondary cities have become hollowed out to go to Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

And so instead of maybe having 15% of the country that has a reasonable population density, it’s really closer to 5%. Now, with two cities being larger than they’ve ever been in history. Well, everything else has shrunk into obscurity. You take that population pattern and you remove the structures that allow civilization to function. And we’re probably going to have large parts of the Russian space that currently grow crops.

Stop. What we have seen in Russian agriculture in the last 40 years is you can split the farms basically 4 to 1. Four is the old Soviet style. So roughly 80% very input intensive, wildly inefficient, using mostly local inputs. And the remaining 20% are more what they call enterprise farms, where they bring in Western equipment and technology and inputs.

And those Western oriented farms, are much more productive and generate a lot more income. And probably in terms of calories, generate actually more than the other 80% put together. The problem is, and they’re in the best land, the problem is that 20% is completely dependent upon those international allies supply chain systems, and very few of them are on the borders of the country.

So if Russia breaks down to the point that the 20% the enterprise farms cannot access the inputs they need, they’ll stop functioning or will go back to functioning like the other 80%. So we’re going to see a pretty significant drop in the ability of the Russian area to generate food product as the Russian system loses coherence. I don’t think that will lead to widespread famine or anything, but they’ll certainly be distribution issues, which has always been a Russian problem.

And it suggests that the ability of Russia to maintain a population that’s even less than it has now, might be somewhat constrained when that happens, the mineral output of Russia falls into very dire straits, because most of this stuff is nowhere near where the people live. The nickel, the Palladium, the platinum, the other platinum metals. They’re all up in the high Arctic, say the Cola peninsula or around Norilsk in north central Siberia.

All the gold is out. In eastern Siberia, the oil is in the permafrost, and the infrastructure that is necessary to access and extract out these materials really does require a lot of industrial age maintenance. And it’s maintenance that the Russians have had a hard time doing themselves. On the production side, the Russians have seen their educational system collapse to the point that you only really have a small number, just a few dozen of Russian nationals who were trained abroad over the last 20 years who are keeping this thing going.

And again, they need a lot of Western technology to keep it flowing. So what usually what happens is the Chinese buys, say, the drilling rigs, and then they sell it on to the Russians, a second hand materials. Anything happens to that, the stuff falls apart. So if there is going to be a play for Russian production, you’re talking about a foreign power having to come combine with capital, with technology, with security, and run basically a neo style colony in order to produce the stuff.

And some of the harshest operating environments in the world. And if that infrastructure is dependent on a link back to Russia proper, then the Russian government that remains whatever that looks like, will have a say in it. And so that probably won’t happen at all. So it’s only the stuff on the extremities that might be able to still function.

So you’re talking about the Russian high Arctic, say Sakhalin Island out in the, Far East theater and maybe some select things in East Siberia. Beyond that, it is really hard to see anyone making a mineral play here, because everything is just so far damn away. And if you were to do that, like, say, let’s say you wanted to go take over something in a gold mine in eastern Siberia, you’re talking and have to building a supply chain through an area that is really only supplied by air.

And the chances for everything to go wrong are robust. There is one other consideration.

That’s an ethnic angle to a breakup.

Russia’s population by Russia’s statistics, which are higher than reality would suggest and indicate that it’s a more cohesive nation state than the reality would suggest. Even then, they claim that 20% of their population is not ethnic Russian, with the single largest minority being Turkic minorities. These minorities are kind of concentrated in three general areas. Siberia. In the West, where you’ve got a lot of,

pockets of Germans and especially Ukrainians, and then down in the south where you’ve got, Tartars and bash queers and Chechens and English and the rest, if we’re going to see a meaningful break in the Russian system, a lot of these groups are likely to try to go their own way.

And the ones to watch the most are the ones that are either close to a border, or they may have a foreign sponsor or the ones that are on key pieces of infrastructure or transport corridors, which means that they could actually make a go of it themselves and actually extract, concessions from the ethnic Russians around them. And the second group, it’s the Tatars in the Basque year that are by far the ones you should watch the most.

They live in an area just to the northwest. Kazakhstan. And they sit on all the connecting infrastructure between Russia and Siberia. So if they were to break away, there goes all of Siberia. And they also have significant energy reserves, some cells that they broadly know how to produce and process themselves. Now, there’s still over a thousand miles away from any potential export market.

So that’s not a a clean fix. But if anyone from a technical point of view can make it a go of it, it’s these places. Because these places never saw their technical folks, flee after the Soviet system. They stayed home, the other groups are the ones that are really close to the external borders. And of course, the caucuses are at the top of that list.

And that’s where the Chechens are. And here the country to watch is Turkey, because all of these, almost all of these minorities are Turkic in nature. And the Turks were very active in sponsoring the first and the second Chechen wars in the caucuses, and the idea that central power in Moscow would crack, and they wouldn’t have an interest in expanding their sphere of influence into the caucuses, is kind of silly.

Also, keep in mind that if the Russian republics on the north side of the Caucasus mountains were to go their own way, then that would basically break Russia’s ability to control not just the Caucasus, but would really hurt Ukraine as well, because it’s all part of the same population. Band. So good for everyone except for Russia proper.

The final little piece to keep in mind is in the extreme northwest, where you have a number of, Turkic minorities. If you remember your recent history back in World War Two, the Finns were one of the first countries. Finland was one of the first countries that Russia attacked. And while it was never formally an ally, if anything, it cooperated more with the Nazis because it was in the same theater.

And at the end of the war, we saw the Soviets basically gobble up territory that at one point housed one quarter of the Finnish population. We like to think of the Finns as neutral. We like to think of the Swedes as, you know, attractive, but kind of in their own world. We forget that the Scandinavians got started as fucking Vikings.

And now that they’re no longer, strategically neutral, now that they’re active in the Western alliance, they’ve rapidly emerged as some of the most aggressive allies that the United States has ever had. And unlike countries in Central America whose militaries were defunct when they joined, these are countries that have a very robust military tradition that is very, very current.

So when and if the Russian state breaks, I can guarantee you that we’re going to see a new iteration of Scandinavian Vikings going back into the Russian space, in many cases just to get their land back. But I would be shocked if that’s all they did keep in mind that the original Vikings that went up the rivers are the ones who probably found in Kiev and certainly Moscow, and in the last great war that we saw in the region that involved Sweden.

The decisive conflict that broke the Swedish empire happened actually in Ukraine. So when the Russians started to invade Ukraine again, it started history moving in Stockholm and Helsinki and the rest in a way that I don’t think the rest of the West really appreciates.

And regardless of how the Ukraine war goes, we’re going to be seeing the next chapter of this little bit of history in the decades to come.

The Russian Depopulation

Photo of Russian dolls moving down in smaller size

Today we’ll be discussing Russian birth and death rates since we’ve got some new Russian demographic data to look at. So, go ahead and grab that truckload of salt.

Russian birth and death rates have fluctuated quite a bit due to major events. The most notable was the demographic “death cross” in the 1990s where deaths outnumbered births; this sent the Russians down a dark path of population decline. Despite some brief recoveries throughout the past few decades, new data out of Russia has confirmed things have worsened.

That recent Russian data is likely overly optimistic, so things are bad. Combine that bleak demographic outlook with no improvements to infrastructure, education, or public health, and you can do the math. Of course, the Ukraine War has accelerated this crisis, as the Russians have sent wave after wave into the meat grinder. That current strategy is unsustainable, but a victory in Ukraine could at least put a little bit of air into the Russians’ lungs. A loss or stagnation would suck even more air out.

Either way, Russia is quickly hacking away at its final opportunity at demographic recovery, which brings long-term viability as a functional state into question.

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. Coming to you from Bell Block, New Zealand. Today we are going to discuss the newest data that’s out from the Russians on their demographics. Russia stopped collecting, demographic data about 17, 18 years ago and have really just been making it up ever since. Now, if you look back through Russian history, there have been a lot of, dark chapters.

And as a rule, when people are depressed, they don’t feel it’s a good idea to have a lot of kids. So these giant rises and dips in the Russian birth rate and death rate, based on what’s going on culturally and economically with the country. Now, the biggest ones, of course, are World War one, World War two. There was a time when Khrushchev tried to shove everyone into small apartments because he thought that was modern, less room for kids. And then, of course, the biggest one is the post-Soviet collapse, when the bottom two, a lot of the Soviet system and we had extended period about 20 years, where basically nothing got better.

You combine this with rampant heroin use and, alcoholism. That is just atrocious by most modern country. Measures, and you get something called a Death cross that happened in the 1990s. And that’s a point when the birth rate and the death rate crossed so that the death rate is higher. And even before you consider incremental mortality issues, you have population shrinkage. Now, a couple of things to keep in mind.

Number one, the Russians back in the mid 80s had this moment of opening and perestroika where we thought maybe, just maybe, we can save the Soviet system. And there absolutely was a little baby boom. And if you fast forward 25, 30 years to just a few years ago, the children of that baby boom, also had kids at a time when Russia was riding high on high energy prices under Vladimir Putin, in the late 2000.

I’m sorry, 20 tens. And so we got another little mini beanie boom. And so that death cross re crossed into a life cross very, very briefly for a very, very low cross. But it was successful and at least for a couple of years bringing the birthrate back up about the death rate. Well with the new data it is clear that that has now reversed.

And remember, this is new data provided by the Russian government is undoubtedly overly optimistic. But even by their own data, they’re now back in the negative territory. All right. So this takes us two places. Number one, none of the underlying issues that have plagued Russia for the last century have gone away. All of them are more intense.

The infrastructure of the Soviet period is still degrading. The Russians have still been unable to rebuild their educational system. Alcoholism is still arise. Drug use is still rife. I’ve run out of speech. Going to go the other way now. And so you shouldn’t expect any improvement because it’s going to be another 25, 30 years before now, the grandchildren of perestroika could be born.

And so you’re dealing more now with the aftereffects of World War one and World War two and oppression and the post-Soviet collapse. And it’s more likely that this period of death is going to be far more intense than what we’ve seen before, because all of the younger people are now older. You know, the boom that they had, say, in the 70s, and they’re just unable to have children now.

The next generation that will be able to have children will be doing it for another 20 years. And second, and far more intensely, is the Ukraine war. As you will notice from this most recent death across it began before the Ukraine war, before Ukraine, or before it began, before the Ukraine war, before Russia became a pariah again, before Russia was under the most extreme sanctions that any major country has ever been on before.

The Russians started seeing massive battlefield casualties. So we are again, in one of those moments in Russian history where people are unsure of their future and they’re not having kids. In addition to the fact that the demographic moment has already passed from the perestroika boom echo, we are already seeing on a daily basis for the last year and a half that more Russian men are dying on the fields of battle in Ukraine than, Russian boys are being born.

And we’ve even had a few days where more men have been dying in the fields of Ukraine than the total number of births – boys and girls.

So We are seeing the Russians waste their last chance to have positive demographic growth ever. And there’s no reason to expect that there’s anything in the Russian system that’s going to improve the, the birthrate or decrease the death rate anytime soon. One of the reasons why Russia has been a major power for so long is numbers.

They have a lot of hope, you know. We’ve had a large country with a lot of ethnic groups and disposing of surplus ethnic groups in the middle of war has long been a Russian strategy for managing their population. They’re doing that now. But you can only do that so long. And that always assumes that you have a robust birthrate, which the Russians don’t anymore.

So the Russians have never been really able to upgrade and update their military strategies in the post-Cold War era to reflect the changes in the demographic picture that just no longer exist and really haven’t existed for decades. So it’s all about lots and lots of artillery. It’s all about what they call meat assaults. It’s human wave tactics, and that works as long as you massively outnumber your foe.

And there are roughly four Russians for every Ukrainian. So it’s not a strategy that is stupid, but is a strategy that if you keep using it when you don’t have a bottomless supply of fighters, that you really eat into what allows your country to exist in the first place. Now, even with this going on, the Russians have more time on their demographic clock than a country like, say, China that has had a rock bottom birth rate now for 40 years.

But when you start burning more people in their 20s than you’re generating babies. You are definitely on a starvation diet. And the question in my mind has always been, when this century, does the Russian ethnicity lose sufficient coherence that it can’t even maintain a state? If they win the Ukraine war, they establish a better external buffer system.

I would say that that would probably be the 2070s or 2080s. But if they become stalled in Ukraine, if they get forced into a piece or a battlefield defeat, that means that they have expended all of the costs of fighting a major war without getting many of the benefits. Then you’re looking at this happening 20, 30, maybe even 40 years earlier.

So, believe it or not, we’re in this weird situation where as long as the Russians are doing this terrific meat assault, it’s really good for the rest of the world. Unless, of course, you happen to be the country that’s on the receiving end. That would be Ukraine. Because it brings forward the day where the Russians just can’t fight any longer at all.

The Real Secret to Saving Birthrates

Today’s conversation might piss off a few prophylactic companies (no, I’m not suggesting we buy thumb tacks and go crazy). The question of the day is…how can we get people to procreate?

No, the lingerie and aphrodisiacs aren’t going to save us this time, we’re talking about bigger changes. A good starting point is making having kids easier: lower costs for essentials like housing, electricity, and food. But then you still need those parents to remain part of the workforce. So, the sticking point is childcare.

Affordable childcare might just be the most effective policy to sustain birthrates and keep your workforce intact in the process. Certain industries in the US (like healthcare) and countries (like Scandinavia) have somewhat figured this out, although it can be pricey.

Once you get the childcare piece taken care of, then you need space for these children to play and grow. Take New Zealand for example, they’ve found a way to keep children (and tipsy adults if we’re being honest) busy for hours and hours…

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, coming to you from Tongariro National Park in New Zealand while I’m doing the Tongariro Northern Circuit, that is mountain Guro in the background, which is and we basically we’ve been going around it the whole time. So why it’s called Tongariro Circuit, not in the whole circuit, I don’t know. Anyway, you might recognize that mountain from Lord of the rings that is Mountain Doom.

So I prefer to call this track the Doom Loop. Anyway, today, taking a question from the Patreon crowd. And that’s specifically if demographics are so core to the success and failure of countries, what are some policies that could be adopted to encourage demographic expansion? Just great question. Quick review. People between 20 and 45 are the ones who are raising kids and spending money and building homes.

That’s where most consumption comes from. People between roughly 45 and 65, the kids have moved out. The house has been paid for, but they’re earning a lot. So the consumption is down, but their income is high. And so they are investing. And that’s where the capital in the tax base comes from, having a balance between those two. Without too many retirees, but enough children to generate the next generation.

That’s ultimately what you want anyway. In most of the world, that’s not what we have. Birth rates have been declining for so long that most of the advanced world, including China, in that are not just running out of children. That happened 20, 30, 40 years ago. They’re now running out of working age adults. So for many of these countries, it’s too late, but not for everybody.

For New Zealand, France and the United States and the Scandinavian countries, the demographic structures are much younger, and so there’s plenty of chance to rehabilitate. Really, it comes down to one thing. Whether you make it easy to have kids, financially speaking, so low cost of electricity, low cost of land, low cost of food, those are all real impetuses.

And finding ways to manipulate those things is absolutely important. But the biggest thing is making sure that would be parents are able to still make choices. And for that, you need to keep both parents in the work force should they so choose. And so it isn’t so much subsidization or paying people to have kids that rarely works.

Instead, it is making sure that there are abilities, the parents can still work and have kids. And that really comes down to childcare. If you can provide affordable, easily accessible childcare, that’s the single biggest thing you can do to keep the birth rates high, because parents, whether men or women are going to not feel like that, they have to make sacrifices in order to have a family, in the United States.

I would argue that the only place that we get this right is with health care personnel. Because if you’re on call and you have to run into the hospital or the clinic, then your kid has to go somewhere. And so there’s a really robust system in the United States for that, for that specific subsector. But for everyone else, you’re kind of on your own.

If you don’t have a grandparent or an aunt or uncle nearby. The Scandinavians have done this a different way where they just have state subsidized health care for everybody. But that gets really expensive really quickly. Hopefully we can figure out something in between in the United States, before the birthrate drops to low.

Okay. We’re going to finish this one up for menopause. Now, as any parent will tell you, there’s one other thing that you have to have if you’re going to be raising kids in that space and the transition from agrarian to industrialized lifestyles, we all started moving into towns and the ability to banish kids to the outside went down.

So even more than needing childcare, you need the ability to put your kids somewhere. Well, in New Zealand, they’ve got that in spades. Not only is there a lot of green space in the country, but they have gone out and built in every major population center, including all the minor ones. Something really special.

Syria Opens Doors for Turkey

Flag of Turkey being flown in front of a building

Syria’s interim leader Ahmed Al Shara has been meeting with the region’s big dogs – Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Respectively, they represent the financial backbone and the military power of the region, so buddying up isn’t the worst idea.

Syria is a complex place, with six distinct regions of varying autonomy. So, there’s a lot of moving parts. Al Shara is teasing the idea of inviting Turkey to establish air bases in southeastern Syria, solidifying Turkish influence in the region.

This sounds like a pretty sweet deal for Turkey. It limits Saudi and Iraqi influence. They could box in Syrian Kurdish forces and prevent Kurdish separatism in Turkey. The US would likely vacate Syria and rely on Turkey to handle things. Not a bad deal for the Turks.

If Turkey could limit Syrian conflict, they could shift their focus to other regional priorities. Should that happen, it is very likely that Turkish power would make a return to pre-WWI levels and reshape the region’s balance of power.

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, coming to you from a hotel room in San Antonio. I think so. Anyway, today is February 5th. You’re going to see this on the sixth and the last couple of days. The new interim leader of Syria, a guy by the name of Ahmed Al Shara, has been making the rounds in the Middle East with the two most important stops being, Saudi Arabia, where the money comes from, and Turkey, where the power comes from.

While there, he had talks about economics and aid and security with all the players, and he specifically mentioned that he was looking forward to an extending an invitation to the Turks to set up military facilities in the country, specifically air bases in the desert in the southeast of the country. This makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons, for a lot of players.

But let me just kind of break down what Syria is, what it’s not, and how the Turks fit in. Well, this series is not a single place. It’s the race that was left over from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and at very few points throughout, history, going back centuries. Has it ever been an autonomous chunk of territory?

It’s only because it was all that was left over after the rest of the region got carved up into today’s nation states, it was what was left, and eventually a dictatorship took over, ran the place into the ground and led to the civil war that has recently concluded, or at least entered a new stage. Anyway, there’s not one Syria.

There’s there’s six, in the far north west, there’s a thin coastal strip, it’s where Latakia is. And that is home to a number of minorities, most notably the Alawites, who until recently ran the country. But in the end of the civil war, they basically fled everywhere else. It all went home. And so they have seen the greatest decline in their prospects of any of the groups, as this war has come to at least a temporary conclusion.

And they I don’t want to say they’re a non-factor, but they’re in a box and they really can’t project power to the rest of the country. Now you go to the east, you cross some coastal mountains, and you get to the corridor of Aleppo, Ham and Hama. And the this is the demographic and economic core of the country.

It’s also been devastated. This is where most of the fighting happened. And this is certainly where the Russians carried out what they call urban pacification programs, which is basically putting artillery and air power out of a city and bombing anything that is taller than two rocks on top of one another. This is where most of the war crimes happen.

This is where most of the genocides were even before the war, when the Alawites were in charge by themselves. You move south, you cross a desert gap, and you get to Damascus, which is an oasis city with a couple million people. It’s basically a fortress city in the middle of nowhere. And you go further south from that, and you hit the Druze mountain, which is home to probably the most bad ass of the minorities in the Middle East and is a world all its own.

In the northeast, along the Euphrates River, you have where the Kurds live, and then the southeast half, two thirds of the country, is hard desert. And aside from a few Badoo that go through there, this is kind of ISIS country. There’s really not much. So if the, the bases happened, they’re going to be in that desert section.

And that achieves a number of things for the Turks. Number one, it puts a bracket around what is possible in Syria, and it separates Syria from both Saudi Arabia and Iraq. And considering smuggling in this part of the world is a big deal and has really helped fuel the war. That is something that the Turks would really like to do, but also be able to project power both into Mesopotamia and into Arabia, which would be a nice touch.

But most importantly, it puts the sharp end of Turkish power on both sides of the Syrian Kurds. And the Turks are worried primarily about the Kurds causing the secessionist uprisings back home. So anything that puts the Syrian Kurds into a box is something the Turks are going to want to do.

In addition, that also basically ends any possibility of the United States having any military presence in the country, because we’ve been partnering with the Kurds to resist Assad. And now that Assad, the Alawite government of old, is gone, the strategic need for the US is weakened. And if Turkey, which is how we supply our forces in Syria, turns hostile and puts military bases on both sides of American forces, it’s just not a tenable situation.

Okay. So, that’s kind of the small Syrian picture. The bigger Turkish picture is more important. Turkey has the most viable land. The most sophisticated economy, the most powerful economy, the most powerful military, the most advanced industrial base in the broader region. And that’s not just in the Middle East either, includes the caucuses and the Balkans as well, and arguably even the Black Sea region.

But while Turkey is powerful and is the most powerful player, it can’t do everything at once. It has to choose. And so it’s got issues with Greece and with the Western Balkans and with Ukraine and the Russians and with the caucuses and with Iran and of course, with the Middle East. But now with the Civil War having wound down in Syria, Turkey has this tantalizing possibility to have this area and be done with it.

It’s not that there’s a lot that’s economically viable in Syria at all. It’s not. But if there’s no longer a war and you have a military footprint in the area, and the tentative government in the area is pro Turkish because you put them there, then the Turks have achieved potentially something that I don’t think a lot of people appreciate.

Stability in Syria. I mean, that’s, that’s hard. And if this sticks, if the Turks will still have to invest quite a bit of military, assets here to make it stick, but if it sticks, then the Turks can move on to an area that is far more core to their interests. Which means for the first time in 30 years, the Turks are not simply a free agent, but a free agent with a free hand.

And I can guarantee you that the major players at the Turks might stick their noses into, the European Union, the Russians, the Iranians are not ready for an unrestrained turkey to reenter their neighborhood. So this is about to get delightfully real very quickly. We haven’t really seen the Turks act as a true power since before World War One.

It’s been over a century. But in the aftermath of the Cold War and now in the aftermath of the Syrian Civil War, the Turks are back. They’ve got the capacity, and they’re trying to decide where to go next.

Coal Remains Essential for US Electricity

Georgia Power (owned by Southern Company) updated its IRP and is sending environmental activists into a tizzy.

The update revealed a significant increase in projected power demands, and to keep up, Georgia Power plans to expand power generation across various sources. That includes delaying the decommissioning of certain coal plants. Hence the environmental tizzy.

But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The US is reindustrializing, and electricity demands are poised to skyrocket. With manufacturing, AI and data centers all requiring constant, reliable power, there’s not a whole lot of viable options that can provide a base load like coal.

Eventually coal is going to get the boot, but it’s a necessary evil for the time being. As energy transitions begin, we’ll take one step closer to saying goodbye, but that could be a decade or two from 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.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming from Colorado. And today we’re gonna talk about electricity in the United States. Specifically, Georgia Power, which is one of the largest components of Southern Company, which is I believe is now the second largest electricity producer in the United States, covers the southeastern part of the country. They filed something on Friday, December 31st, called an IRP, an integrated resource plan.

And basically it’s their more than back of envelope sketches for how they plan to meet power demand over the next three years. They filed an intermediate one last year, and the big difference between last year and this year is they’re anticipating, demand growth in their region by the end of the decade, growing by over two gigawatts, more than what they had planned for just 12 months ago.

And so in order to meet that demand, they’re adding more power by pretty much every type of generation you can imagine. But the biggest change is that they’re not going to decommission a couple of coal plants, which of course has some environmental interest up in arms. Expect to see a lot more of this.

One of the things to keep in mind when you’re talking about this economic transition the United States is going through, is in order to prepare for a post China world, we need to double the size of the industrial plant in this country.

And that’s before you consider trade wars. That’s before you consider resource conflicts. That’s before you consider the green transition, which will move a lot of things from, fossil fuel to a more, alternative system. We just are gonna need more power.

Digitization is great. AI’s wonderful and all those good things. But ultimately, if your economy is going to not just be based on services, if it’s going to be based on manufacturing, if it’s going to be about moving things and stamping things and heating things and smelting things, you’re going to use a lot more electricity.

And the IRP that Georgia Power just updated reflects that. And you can only add new forms of electrical generation so quickly. And that even assumes that the regulatory picture is very favorable. Now in southern companies zone of operation, Southern Company gets along great with all of the state legislators and the state regulators. So they face fewer obstacles than most electrical companies, in adding new capacity.

But there are still upper limits on how fast you can add stuff. One of the biggest restrictions of things like Transformers, which can have a lead time of 36 to 60 months and until recently, Transformers have had like a 2 to 4 year waiting list based on what model you were looking at. And without the Transformers doesn’t really matter if you had the generation or not.

So there’s a lot of delays that are just kind of hardwired into this sort of problem. But ultimately it’s about generation. If you can’t generate the electrons to run through the system, the rest of it is kind of a moot argument. And Georgia Power is now admitting in their IRP that coal, at least in the mid-term, has to be part of the solution.

Now, in the long run, coal is definitely going to go away in the United States anyway because natural gas is so much cheaper. And as we continue to make incremental gains in solar and wind and battery, they are becoming more competitive. But the advantage you have with coal is it provides something called baseload. It’s on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.

And that matches up very nicely with most manufacturing processes that run 24 seven, because a lot of it’s automated now and it lines up very well with things like artificial intelligence and data centers, because those server farms will be running 24 hours a day as well. That doesn’t work with solar. When the sun goes down, the electricity stops.

And you really can’t pair most of these new industries that are coming in, whether it’s because of relocation re industrialization or digitization, they just don’t pair well with green tech very well, unless you also put in a huge amount of battery. And by huge I mean massive. The best batteries we have right now can really only discharge four hours of storage.

And there is no place in the continental United States, even in the depths of summer, where you only have four hours of dark. So you have to have something else. And regardless of whether you love it or not, coal is one of those something else’s. So a lot of the coal plants that have been slated for decommissioning or replacement, over the course of the last decade, expect most of those plants to a never be decommissioned, and b if they have been decommissioned but not yet dismantled, expect them to come back, because we’re going to need every electron we can possibly get.

And decarbonization, for better or for worse, is something that’s going to have to wait for at least next decade and maybe the decade after.

Global Economic Growth Patterns (Or Should I Say Decline)

stockmarket candlesticks in the background

We’re looking at some global economic growth patterns today. Unfortunately, we’re entering an era with a lot of unknowns. Between collapsing demographics and industrial challenges, there seems to be more countries in the red than the green.

China is probably the worst off. After rapid growth brought on by urbanization, a large working-age population, and heavy subsidies, their growth has stagnated, and its population is getting more and more top heavy. Without a reversal of these trends, China’s economy is buying a one-way ticket on the struggle bus.

Even advanced economies like those in Europe are feeling the heat. As countries like Germany and Italy face their own demographic issues, new economic models will need to be created to keep their heads above water. Developing nations are a bit behind the curve in terms of aging demographics and industrial buildout, but they’ll need to shift towards higher value industries to ward off economic stagnation. Places like Brazil will also have to deal with China’s predatory industrial policies which have hindered economic progress.

So, it’s not looking great overall. Aging populations and an inability to evolve economically will stall growth in many regions. If these countries cannot navigate industrial transitions, global economic stability is going to look pretty bleak.

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. Coming to you from a chilly, foggy Colorado morning. Today we’re going to talk about growth patterns and what it holds for economic growth, for the world, for the future. Take a look at this chart here. Now this is annual change in GDP from a decade earlier. So you’re getting all the long term trends in one graphic.

The first country, of course, have to deal with is China because it’s such an outlier. China has two stories going on. Three stories, number one, they lie about a lot of their data. So, it’s probably not as good as it sounds. It’s probably at least a third. Less. Maybe half. Anyway, it’s still the fastest growth over the last 50 years in the world.

And that requires some explanation.

Two things going on besides the the line. Number one, the one child policy and rapid urbanization, landed, China with a much, much lower birth rate. In fact, it’s been higher in the United States since the early 90s. Now, in the long term, I have no secret that I think this is going to be the end of not just the Chinese state, but the Chinese nation.

The actual hunt of necessity is going to vanish from the world by the end of this century. But in the meantime, when you have a lot of people in their 20s and 30s and early 40s, but no kids and not a lot of retirees, every bit of energy can be focused on a combination of industrial production and consumption, which are the two primary methods for growing GDP.

And if you have that at the same time that you are also subsidizing the hell out of your industry, so you have a lot of investment led production. Yes, you do get growth and yes, it is robust. And yes, it’s such records, but it also sets the stage for the second problem, which is why that chart has just collapsed on the right side and that is that one.

Those people in their 20s, in their 30s and the early 40s become in their 40s, their 50s and their early 60s. Then that growth story is over, and you no longer have the workforce that is necessary to keep the activity going. And then all that’s left is exports and investment and that’s where the Chinese were about ten, 15 years ago.

Well, now in the late 2020s and moving into the 2030s, the people who are in their 40s, 50s and early 60s move on to their late 50s, 60s and early 70s. And then it’s just over. We’re already in a situation where the Chinese have about the same amount of population, and people over age 50 is under age 50.

This is already a terminal demographic. You just can’t get people in their 60s to kick out kids. But it does also mean that unless, unless, unless, unless the Chinese can wildly automate and retain access to every remaining consumer market in the world, that they are almost done. And we’re seeing that in the data. Now, the second story is what’s going on in the advanced world, most notably, Europe.

And that’s a demographic story, kind of like China. Now the Europeans have a much longer trajectory of history and economic policy than China. Really, China didn’t get started until the opening in 1980. Whereas the Europeans have been part of the industrial process for a century and a half. And so you had more well rounded growth. But the demographic story after World War Two was the same people urbanize, and they industrialize and they had fewer kids.

And you play that for 2 or 3 generations and there just isn’t a replacement generation. So just as with China, the Germans and the Italians have a lot more people over age 50 than they do under 50. In fact, they’ve been there for a decade already. And this is the decade where they start having more people over 60 than under 60.

And that is a very different economic model that we have yet to invent. And it’s difficult to see how it will have any growth at all. So as modern economies, a lot of the advanced world is simply fading away and, fading with ever increasing rapidity. That leaves the developing world minus China, which is a different story. When you apply industrial technologies like asphalt and concrete and steel and rebar and electricity, you get a huge amount of growth because you’re basically introducing a fundamentally new economic model on top of whatever your pre-industrial system was.

And in the building of that structure and the growth that you get from those structures, obviously your GDP rises quite a bit. But then the question is whether or not you can adapt to a new era. So what happened here in the United States is we did this much more slowly, but as we applied these technologies, we didn’t simply increase our production of raw and processed materials.

We also got into higher value added manufacturing and ultimately services. In most of the developing world, they have not been able, or at least not yet, to successfully make that transition. They’re still, for the most part, raw commodity economies. And so even when you industrialize but don’t change your underlying economic fabric, you get a really good burst of growth for 20, 30 years.

And then it just stops. And with the exception of, say, the Northeast Asian tigers like, Taiwan and Korea that have made that transition, whether you are in Brazil or Nigeria or even increasingly, South Africa, the jump was never made.

The 80s, the 90s and especially the 2000 were great growth decade.

But by the time you get to the 20 tens, it kind of started to fall apart. And now in the 2020s, it’s gone and they just haven’t made the jump. Now they did kind of have the deck stacked against them. They paid for a lot of this industrialization with borrowed money from the advanced economies. And they all have had some sort of debt crisis, which definitely held them back.

But the bigger issue was China. China used predatory industrial policies to basically gobble up the industrial, capacity of all of these developing countries and moved all that industrial plant to China. The country that has suffered by far the most from that policy is, Brazil, where in the 2000s the Chinese went into Brazil, establish joint ventures with all of these companies were actually solid, maybe even world leading in their sectors.

The Chinese stole the technologies, took them back to China, build up an industrial plant that was subsidized to compete with the Brazilians on the global stage, and not only destroy the ability of the Brazilians to export to the global market. Ultimately flooded Brazil with Chinese product and destroyed those companies at home as well. Anyway, once that is done, you know, the Brazilians today would have to start over.

But they have to start over with the demographic that has changed as well, just as the Chinese and everyone else has aged. That has happened in the developing world as well, just starting from a later point. Now we’re nowhere near the point that the Chinese or the Germans, that this is not the last decade for countries like Turkey or Indonesia, Brazil, but they are aging at nearly the same rate as the Europeans almost as fast as the Chinese.

And if they can’t find a way to change that underlying economic model in the next 20 years, then they’re going to be facing exactly the same sort of demographic pressures that the Europeans and the Chinese are facing today. So it’s not all the same for everybody, but all the trends are they’re just wrapped up in a slightly different picture.

And it does mean that for the remainder of the first half of this century, we’re looking at most of the growth patterns that were established that were very, very fast at the beginning of the century, simply falling apart because there’s no demographic wherewithal to carry them forward, or the countries haven’t been able to modernize and diversify their economic structures enough to get out of the commodity rut.

And that is a pretty dark picture for a lot of countries. There just aren’t enough that have made the transition in order to carry us all along.

Dealing With Chinese Drones

Drones are all the rage right now and China is jumping on the bandwagon. With Chinese plans to create over 1 million combat-ready drones within two years, should the US be worried?

Drones may seem like a foolproof option, but that’s not the case. There are range, payload, and speed issues to consider, as well as ensuring an accurate guidance and targeting system is in place. The Chinese haven’t quite figured out all of those pieces. You must also factor in the US space and tech capabilities, which could render Chinese drones useless if it came to that.

If you want to make the argument that these drones open new doors for the Chinese, consider these factors. China’s drones would likely limit US naval operations near the mainland, but the Chinese air force already does that. Sure, there might be opportunities to make a little cash by offloading these drones in foreign markets, but not enough to move the needle. The only way I see these drones really impacting much would be if a drone-mothership was created and deployed (which the US is working on, not the Chinese).

All this to say, China’s drone production is impressive in scale, but their effectiveness in naval combat will be limited.

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Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from the air in slow burn. And a glacier in New Zealand just to the north of the town of Glenorchy. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page. And it is how is the United States going to deal with the absolute scads of drones that the Chinese say that they’re going to build?

The Chinese official plan, which I have no reason to doubt that they cannot achieve it, is to have over 1 million combat ready drones within two years. First, let’s talk about the nature of that sort of threat. And then second, what the US Navy has to do differently from what it’s uphill, might have to do differently.

I’m just climbing the marine here.

First of all, a million is a lot. But keep in mind, as we are learning from the Ukraine war, whenever you’re going to have a weapons platform, you have to choose, largely between payload and range. So the farther you’re going to go, the less of a warhead you can carry. And there’s always detection issues too. So even the new rocket drones that the Ukrainians have been using, which have more weaponry and more kinetic force, really only have a range of, low number of hundreds of kilometers.

So if you got a million weaponized systems and you can only throw them, a couple hundred kilometers or less, it’s, never going to even enter the defensive envelope. Of an American destroyer, much less an aircraft carrier. Second, in addition to the balance between range and warhead, there’s also the issue of speed.

For example, the Iranian Shaheed drones, which have been causing a lot of havoc in the Ukraine war, only fly had about 150km a hour. It’s roughly 9100 miles an hour. So, you know, I don’t if you knew this, but naval ships, they move, so move pretty fast. So as in the words of the great man, Mr. Miyagi, best way to avoid a punch is no be there.

Which brings us to guidance. Something we have discovered over and over in the Ukraine war is it doesn’t matter how many drones you have and how fast they are and how big their warheads are. If they can’t see the target. Most drones today require eyes on. They require a controller. And so if you don’t have a controller with a constant telemetry link to the weapon system, the weapon is just going to spin out of control and crash harmlessly.

And you know, when you’re talking about naval combat, that, harmlessly means in the ocean, you might like you can have a lot of collateral damage. Now, there are two ways around this. The first is a problem that the Chinese are struggling with, with all of their other weapons systems. The Chinese have a number of long range systems, especially when it comes to, ballistic missiles.

The problem is targeting. So the United States is really good with its missile forces. If we’re doing something like a ballistic against a land target, you know, you have coordinates. It’s really hard to do anything about that. And if you’re going to use something like a cruise missile, the United States basically loads in geographic information into the brain of the cruise missile.

And the follow is a programed route to hit its target. When you’re dealing with moving targets, it’s a lot harder. You have to have eyes on. And the problem that the Chinese have is while they do have a whole lot of weapons systems and people and manufacturing capacity, it’s really hard to have eyes on something that’s over the horizon that is moving.

So everything is dependent upon maintaining that telemetry link and having eyes in the sky, probably in the form of a reconnaissance satellite. And while the Chinese do have the ability to launch and maintain their own satellite fleet, their space weapons systems are woefully nascent. They’re new. And if we were to have a conflict with any of the technologies that the Chinese currently have in place or deployed, you basically have the United States who’s been playing this game for 60 years, take out every Chinese satellite in the sky in a matter of a few days, if not even a few hours.

And then all of a sudden, all of these longer range weapons systems that the Chinese have are blind and can’t hit anything that can move. And again, that’s way to avoid a punch movie there. Okay. With drones, this is even more problematic. The only way that we have technology today where a drone can reliably get around jamming is to have a fiber optic spool where you literally have a physical cable connecting the drone back several kilometers to the operator.

But several kilometers is like, you know, the range of seeing the horizon when you’re at sea level. You put it on a boat, you might be able to go a little bit further, but nothing weighs nothing. And you’re going to have a spool that goes out 50 K. You know, that’s already beyond the technology that we have today.

So like everything the Chinese do, they do it at scale. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a game changer. It may limit what the US Navy can do within sight of the mainland. But I would argue that all this talk about Chinese drones when it comes to naval combat, does not do anything for them at all. That their air force doesn’t do better already.

So it’s a lot of talk and, it’s interesting because it is a new technology. It will keep evolving, but I think the field where it’s going to be more of an issue is arms exports, because of the Chinese can make lots and lots of these things. They may not be useful, in a sea fight or even in a land fight.

Although if they decided to invade Russia, I could get curious. But they might be useful as an export product. If the Chinese started sending all kinds of stuff in to say, just to pick something out of random, the African theater and arming groups to achieve this or that, that could go some interesting directions. But make no mistake, the places where the Chinese are going to find customers here are not places that are.

How should I put this civilization strong? It’s more likely to be in semi stateless areas, which is going to limit the amount of income that they can get from them. And if they start deciding to supply weapons to quote unquote countries. Who’s it going to be? I mean, no one in Latin America has a territorial dispute. We haven’t seen a war in Latin American, not counting the soccer world worth a bunch of people got lost in the jungle.

I think you have to go back to, like, the 1880s.

They get involved in Europe. The Russians, you know, might buy this stuff in scale. But if the Chinese start supplying hundreds of thousands of weapons systems that are finished to the Russians, we’re in a very different world already. Southeast Asia could be fun, but drones with today’s technology really don’t do well in heavy forest or jungles.

I mean, I tried it. That was an expensive experiment. That just leaves Africa and the opens of places like, say, the Sahel. A booming arms market for a country the size of China. That is not so with today’s technology, with the likely evolution of this technology over the next several years. This is not something I worry about too much.

What would make this change is not just a general improvement in the range and the payload and the accuracy and all that good stuff, but being able to make, a drone mothership, that has all the normal aspects of a military vessel, but also has the ability to manufacture drones at scale, with its own facilities.

And that’s something that at the moment, the Chinese are not working on because they haven’t figured out the tech. That is, however, something that the United States is working on with the replicator initiative, which should be operational by the end of 2026.

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

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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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