Peter Zeihan, Author at Zeihan on Geopolitics

The Russian Reach: US Cuts Ukraine Intel & Dominos Fall

The US has halted all intelligence sharing with Ukraine. If you thought the weapons cutoff was a big deal, buckle up. Since Ukraine relies on US intelligence for battlefield maneuvers, we might as well start air-dropping blindfolds to Ukraine.

You can bet your ass that Russia will happily exploit this weakening of Ukraine. However, the fallout of this move by the US is not contained to the battlefield, or even the region. Key US allies are now raising alarms over fear of intelligence leaks and potential Russian access to sensitive information. The Five Eyes alliance is on red alert over the lax handling of classified data and leadership purges under Trump.

This is an unprecedented intelligence breakdown and puts a fat ole ‘X’ on US credibility.

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, this one is going to seem a little out of order in the series, but, events are happening very, very quickly. We’re getting overtaken by them. It’s the 5th of March while I’m recording this.

And the United States has just ceased all intelligence sharing in cooperation with Ukraine. There’s any number of reasons why this is not in America’s interests. Not to mention, you know, all the Intel that the U.S was gathering from Ukraine. But for the Ukrainians, this is actually far more important than the weapons cutoff that is now about 96 hours old. The United States contrary to what you might have heard, has supplied Ukraine with less than one third of its, equipment in any given day of the stuff that is important from somewhere else.

And probably 40% of the total that Ukraine uses now is produced within Ukraine itself. So while losing access to the weapons flows is bad, it’s not nearly as deadly to Ukraine as losing access to the information that allows the Ukrainians to target it. The Russians outnumber the Ukrainians in every field, and can draw upon the old Soviet era stockpiles, in addition to the Chinese and North Korean troops and equipment.

That gives them a huge numerical advantage. So the way the Ukrainians have been staying, one step ahead is to do two things. Number one, try to turn the war into a war of movement at any given point so that numbers in any particular place can be moved and concentrated to attack Russian weak points, as opposed to staying still and letting the Russians to come to them and grind and grind and grind.

And then, number two, know where the Russians are coming from, not just so you can maneuver, but so you can target logistics in that direction and know which rail lines, in which trucks, in which intersections and all that good stuff without American signals intelligence, satellite intelligence, a lot of that goes away. The other NATO countries do have some capacity, but, the agreements that are made with NATO were specifically designed so that the United States maintains preeminence in all of that.

And by turning it off, the Ukrainians basically lose every advantage that they had in the fight, with the exception of the drones. And the drones require long range targeting information that came from the Intel. So they can really only be used relatively close to the front. In contrast, every advantage that the Russians have can now be pushed to its ultimate maximum because they will be encountering Ukrainians in pockets that can’t maneuver intelligently, and just overwhelming them with sheer numbers of weapons and people.

So far from being an honest broker, far from trying negotiate peace, this is a flat out effort by the Trump administration to crush the Ukrainians on the battlefield as quickly as possible, and about the only thing that they could do that would be more horrific than this would be to actually provide information to the Russians directly. And we are now in a World war.

I can no longer rule that out.

Well, shit, we may already be there in the time that it took us to process the previous section of this video. We’ve had a number of America’s close security partners. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand all publicly float through back channels that, they are considering suspending, at least selectively, intelligence, cooperation with the United States.

The two reasons given, again, backchannels very, very spy worthy are they’re concerned that the United States is just hemorrhaging classified information, not necessarily the information per se. And the findings, the raw Intel, all of that, too, but methods of collection and integration that would basically endanger their entire Intel networks and their own national security. And of course, the second piece is whether or not the Russians are actually reading any of this as well.

Quick backstory. So intelligence cooperation with Saudi and Israel has always been a little, tongue in cheek because, like, we’re worried that the Americans are going to leak and then something bad will happen. And the Americans, like, we’re worried that you’re going to leak and something bad is going to happen. So it’s always been a little bit of back and forth, and we only cooperate with one another on the things that are of direct interest to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It’s not like they’re getting the motherlode here. But their primary concern, of course, is if you’re Israel and if you are Saudi Arabia, or 3 biggest threats are Russia, Iran and Iran’s various proxy organizations throughout the region, groups like Hezbollah. And if we now have the United States compromised, there is a question as to how much American Intel and global Intel is getting into those hands, which would, of course, be a real problem for Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The second issue, deals with the Anglo states, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada. Those four combined with United States are called the Five Eyes. And it is the tightest alliance in human history, the tightest alliance in American history. And it is the only system in the world that is basically an open book for Intel sharing.

So the United States collects the lion’s share of the Intel. But there are other things that the other allies are better at, and they all have their own regional networks. So the US collects its bevy, we go and we have a powwow with the rest of the Five Eyes. We compare notes with what they’ve collected, and then we all go back home and take the information that we’ve learned and use that to inform additional investigations using our other partners.

And we just go back and forth and back and forth. It’s a very robust, very productive system. But the five eyes are have two concerns. Number one, the way that the Trump administration is completely gutted, the top level of our intelligence directorates, has them terrified because they are seeing things leaked out into the public sphere. That should be kept secret.

In addition, they’re also very worried about Elon Musk’s Doge, because you’ve got people who are in their 20s with no security clearance or getting access to databases, and then just posted it on social media because it’s fun. Whether this is just rank or gross incompetence on the part of the Trump administration or the Russians are directly manifesting these things from behind the scenes, really doesn’t matter at this point, because anything that gets out, the Russians are going to pick up anyway.

So the five eyes are seen, Russian eyes and fingers in the heart of their own national intelligence system.

Right now, which means that the United States just isn’t a competent or a trustworthy partner to them. And so the question isn’t how will cooperation be scaled back, but how much and where? This isn’t the end of the relationship. This can probably hopefully be fixed, but we haven’t had this sort of sustained breakdown in intelligence collection and processing in the United States ever, not even with the most robust, Soviet moles, Russian moles that we’ve seen.

Folks like Walter James. I can’t believe I have to say this, but if you are one of my followers in the intelligence community, and you are concerned that your senior leadership is either completely incompetent or has already been compromised, your options are limited for what you can do. And I’m assuming you want to do it by the book, in which case the authority that has oversight over your entire world is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

That’s where you need to go. Anyone who says giving information to the oversight committee is traitorous is themselves a traitor. Because this is how the system works. This is how you do it by the book. This is the part of the legislative branch that has actual tactical oversight over everything in the world of Intel. So don’t let people bullshit you on things like that.

And if you are one of my non intelligence industry followers and you do not have a senator who is on the select committee, leave them alone. They’re dealing with enough right now as it is.

The Russian Reach: Geography and Intelligence

Putin, like the Soviets before him, is clouded by fear of invasion due to Russia’s vulnerable geography. Understanding that makes Russia’s strategy of expansion and occupation towards defensible borders clearer.

That’s the backbone of today’s conflict in Ukraine – Russia seeking a secure and manageable perimeter. While this war was inevitable, it is no way the end of the line. Should Russia win in Ukraine, it will push into NATO countries like Poland and the Baltics to “reclaim” the natural geographic barriers once held by the Soviets.

Capturing, occupying, and controlling non-Russian populations is no easy feat, but an extensive intelligence system allows the Russians to rule through fear and disinformation. This system not only keeps these captured people suppressed, but also shapes global politics through covert influence. Tomorrow we’ll discuss how they do this on a global scale.

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.

Okay, let’s look at the world through the Russian eyes. The Russians are from an area that was Moscow. Used to be known as Must Troy, which is in kind of the northwestern part of the Eurasian steppe. Very cold winters, short summers, generally shitty weather. Overall. Very prone to floods and droughts. They are not particularly secure ethnicity. And what they’ve discovered is there’s really nowhere to hide. The force of northern Russia, which could serve as barriers, do work. That’s how they hit out from the Mongols for a while. But, it’s all pine forest in the upper latitudes. And so basic agriculture is almost impossible. Everywhere else is flat.

It’s open. The rain is erratic. It’s very difficult to build the pillars of civilization. And most importantly, there’s no geographic barrier you can hunker behind. So at least one side is free. So you’re completely insecure from all sides in land that is decidedly subpar. The only way that the Russians have discovered that they can achieve any degree of security here is by conquering everyone around them, basically expanding.

They do that. They now have their inner core, which is protected, but they have an outer core that is now occupied hostile minorities. And around that outer core, there’s again no defensible barrier. So they do it again and again and again and again and again and again and again, until they reach an area that they can block. And so they expand from tiny Muscovy away to something more akin to the territory of the Russian Federation today, or ideally, the Soviet Union.

I say ideally, because the really good barriers that actually do limit external attack are the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Sea, the Carpathian Mountains, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the deserts of Central Asia, and the tension mountains of Central Asia. If if the Russians can reach those zones, they shrink their outer perimeter. Give me an idea of just how extreme the differences.

Modern day Russia, which lost a fair amount of territory and half of its population compared to the Soviet Union, actually saw its external boundaries get longer. And the right now about 5000 miles in total. If they were able to re expand to where they were during Soviet times and actually plug the access points between those various barriers, that 5000 miles would shrink to about 500 miles.

That is ultimately what the Russians are fighting for because of the Eastern Hemisphere’s four big regions. The Russians are by far the weakest of the four. You’ve got Europe, which is densely populated. Much better climate can support much denser population patterns. You’ve got the East Asian rim, a very similar to Europe in that regard.

And so you get the Colossus that is China in whatever form it happens to be in. And then you’ve got the areas of the Middle East which combine kind of the best parts of the Russian space with something new. You got a lot of oasis cities. You get a little pockets like Mesopotamia that can support, like European style density populations and then surrounded by Arabs.

So what happens with political entities in the Middle East is they dominate a handful of these oasis communities or these bread baskets, and then they boil out across the deserts because they have mastered long range military, fighting. And so if they can get into the Russian space, they already have the transport technology built in.

So the Europeans can dominate on technology and capital and military force. The Asians can beat the Russians on numbers alone. And the Middle East senators can outmaneuver the Russians. And so the Russians have been invaded 50 odd times in their history. And the only way that they know to protect themselves is to conquer everyone in their neighborhood, and then set up a really dense shell around the outer perimeter.

The Ukraine war was always going to happen because Ukraine has two things going against it. Number one, it’s on the wrong side of that outer shell. And so the Russians see them as one of those internal ethnic groups that has to be oppressed and turned into cannon fodder. Second, the Ukrainians are up against parts of that outer shell, most notably the Arabian Gap, that is, goes into Romania and of course, the Polish gap of Poland.

So this war was always going to happen. The Russians were always going to try to take Ukraine, and Ukraine was never going to be the end of it, because once Ukraine is subjugated, if Ukraine is subjugated, the Russians then need to push to the next line of countries, which includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Romania, five of which are NATO countries.

So this was always going to go down.

But there’s another piece of this that is much more relevant to this overall series that we’re doing right now. And that’s how the Russians manage all of these restive occupied populations. It’s basically everyone who’s living in the Russian Federation who isn’t an ethnic Russian, is someone who’s been conquered because they were in the way or because they were perceived as a threat.

And so the Russians basically have this mélange of occupied populations that, based on whose numbers you’re using, are somewhere between 20 and 40% of Russian citizenry. And that’s before you consider the countries that are on the outside of today’s Russian Federation boundaries, like, you know, say, the Latvians, who used to be the someone of those internal oppressed minorities but have managed to slip away.

Ukraine, until recently was fully in that category. Now it’s a toss up. Well, the Russians can’t occupy them with their military because the military has to be at the frontier. The Russians do not have a good land. They do not have a lot of spare capital to throw around. They can’t go for the sort of fast and loose military forces that countries of the Middle East have done in the past.

They can’t do the technocratic stuff that the Europeans have done in the past. And they no longer have the numbers to do. The human waves, endless human waves that say, the Chinese can do. So their military is spoken for. It’s there to plug the gaps. And if the gaps fail, all that’s left is partizan warfare. So in order to keep their populations from doing the partizans in the wrong direction, the Russians maintain what is arguably the world’s most advanced and penetrating internal intelligence system.

Basically, they shoot through occupied populations with as many agents as they can possibly afford, to monitor the population, to spread disinformation, to keep the population turned against itself. And never, never, never allow them to agitate against Russian occupation in the first place. It makes Russia basically a state that is ruled by terror. And if the Russians happen to not like you for whatever reason, it means that they have this great tool, this Intel system that is great at passing unnoticed among populations, but finding the societal weak points about turning populations against one another.

And at the end of the day, sowing information that can shape policy. And it’s very much in use today. So tomorrow we’ll talk about how the Russians see their Intel system.

A (BIG) Change in Germany

Photo of German flag in front of their parliment

Following the March 4th elections, the Germans are poised to see a significant political and military shift. The ruling Social Democrats suffered a heavy loss, and the Christian Democrats gained significant ground. These parties are now negotiating a coalition, with constitutional amendments allowing for increased deficit spending at the top of the docket.

This marks a dramatic shift for the Germans, as they’ve had decades of limited military spending (for good reason). We can thank Trump for this change, as his stance on Europe, Russia, and NATO left no real alternative for the Germans. These new plans include at least doubling defense spending and creating a massive fund for military-industrial expansion, placing German military expenditures in the 5% of GDP range.

The historic significance of this shift is not lost on me. To add insult to injury, the US government is empowering Germany’s neo-Nazis. I’m not saying that this is the end for democracy and pacifism in Germany, but there are a lot of factors at play here.

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 crisp, Colorado morning. Today we are talking about something that went down in Germany on the 4th of March. Quick backdrop. We had elections in Germany a little over a week ago. The ruling party, the Social Democrats, they lead a three party coalition. Did very, very badly, came in third.

And the main opposition, the Christian Democrats, did very, very well. Came in first and the next government will undoubtedly be in a coalition of those two parties, with the Social Democrats in a significantly worse position than they have been in any government to this point in the post world War two environment. But it is enough to make a majority in the Bundestag, and that’s what you need in order to form the government.

Anyway. The two of them got together to basically hold early coalition talks. It’s only been a week since the election, and the only topic on the agenda was how to amend the constitution so that the German state can issue more government debt, do more deficit spending, specifically to build out its military. This is, this is transformational for any number of reasons.

Let’s start with the center. Right. That’s the Christian Democrats. They’re socially conservative, economically conservative, a little stodgy, but very, very pragmatic. They don’t like issuing debt. They love the United States from defense point of view. And for them to do this is a catastrophic shift in circumstances for them. Donald Trump has basically said, that Europe is, if anything, more of a threat to the United States and the Russians, which is as backwards.

But the Germans have no choice but to take Trump at his word. So we’re talking here about at least Dublin defense spending over the course of the next couple of years, as well as building a €500 billion fund to build out the industrial plant necessary to support it all. It is the largest expenditure of funds in, postwar German history on a single project.

And for Christian Democrats to feel that they have to break with the United States is telling, from the social democratic point of view, they don’t have nearly as much of a problem with the deficit spending, although they’re still German and they still like to keep debt under control, but they don’t like defense spending at all.

And that the doubling of the defense budget came from their negotiator. So you should probably think of it as a floor rather than a ceiling. So very rapidly, we’re going to see the Germans go from something like 1.2 to 1.5% of GDP, going on defense to 4 or 5% of GDP, which will easily put them above the United States by most measures.

Now, two things here. One, from a pragmatic point of view, one from a run for the hills point of view. First, from the pragmatic point of view, the Germans have underinvested in defense spending for decades under all governments. So throwing 5% of GDP, if that does turn out to be the number at the problem helps. But they are so far in the hole they have to rebuild things from scratch.

They have to build the industrial plant and build the educational systems to then build the stuff they need and train the people they need. This doesn’t happen at six months, and at the same time, there’s a very high likelihood that the Germans are going to be in a hot war with the Russians in the not too distant future, as the US basically abrogate all of its NATO responsibilities, withdraws all assistance from Ukraine and looking increasingly likely simply leaves NATO altogether.

The Germans are going to have to do something that they haven’t had to do, since 1945. And let’s think about defense policy as a leader, as opposed to just doing whatever they are told. Which brings us to the run for the hills part of the situation. The Germans never are going to have a preponderance of power in any war.

They don’t have the population to stand against all of their potential foes. And about the only bright spot in all of this is at the moment. The rest of Europe is holding together in whatever NATO or post NATO structures form as the United States exit stage left.

But the last time that the Germans went through a rapid rearming like this, it was the transformation of Weimar Germany to Nazi Germany. And that is a historical parallel that should be lost on no one. In addition, we now have the US government actively supporting the German neo Nazi Party, which is the second largest party in Parliament. Now because of U.S actions, at a time when the Germans are redefining what it means to be a normal country and are massively building up their military in preparation for a major war.

We have seen this movie before. There are a lot of details that still need to be worked out. I am hoping that I am worrying about nothing, and I am hoping that the last 80 years of German near pacifism and democracy has very deep roots and can’t be disrupted by anything as minor as a major war or a major shift in the geopolitical environment.

But I know my history. And when countries are under stress like this, crazy things happen in their domestic politics. And we have seen this movie before in Germany. And it’s not just simply about the rise to the Nazi era. I was very comfortable as an American pain for smug German socialism and pacifism because, historically speaking, I know what the alternative is.

We’re going to find out if there’s a third way here real soon.

The Russian Reach: Why Leadership Doesn’t Matter…Until It Does

Despite the short-term emphasis placed on the title of president, chancellor, or prime minister, the reality is that leadership typically has minimal impact on the trajectory of a nation. The real movers are geography and demography; however, sometimes a leader can be the exception to that rule.

If you take the US, it’s clear that geographic security enabled a flexible and powerful military. If you look at German history, constant neighboring threats lead them down a different path. Demographic structures carry influence in all spheres of life. Younger demos can drive consumption and inflation, while an older, wealthier demo fuels investment and stability. Again, geography and demography are structural realities that are often “untouchable” by a singular leader.

And yet, there are pivotal moments when a leader (or single decision for that matter) can change the course of history. We’re talking about instances like Churchill’s stance during WWII or Zelensky’s defiance in the opening week of the Ukraine War. And now, Trump is pulling the US from its post-Cold War holding pattern and plunging it into a deglobalized system.

Trump’s leadership, coupled with his ability to appoint unqualified officials with little opposition, is a symptom of the disintegration of both major US political parties. Which means we’re entering a period where outside forces, like Russia, can weasel their way into American politics.

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

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

Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here. Coming from Colorado. Today we’re launching into our new series on what the hell is going on in Washington. Over the last few weeks, The Donald Trump administration has taken a number of steps that I don’t think pushed the MAGA agenda at all. And can’t be explained away as incompetence or toddler syndrome or whatever you want to call it.

Something else is up. It seems like the actions were designed specifically to tear down American power over the long term. And so I want to start by talking about why normally leadership just doesn’t matter. All countries are shaped by two things, their physical environment, their geography and their population structure, their demography. You understand those two things.

You can understand the challenges, opportunities and tools in front of a country. So, for example, if you’re a country like the United States that is surrounded by oceans, you don’t have to spend a lot of resources on defending the homeland, especially not on land. And armies are expensive, both in terms of money and in terms of manpower.

So if you are freed up from that, you can then instead invest your people in doing something that will actually earn income and invest your military and naval forces, which, while not cheap, can be wherever you need them to be. And so you basically get a much more mobile military force, and you get to choose the time and the place of when a conflict happens, rather than the other way around.

Another good example are the Germans. They are surrounded by potential competitors the Dutch, the French, the Austrians, the poles, the Russians, the Swedes and off the coast, the Brits. And so no matter where the Germans look, they face a potential threat. And throughout all of German history, until very recently, the goal was always to consolidate as quickly as you can, develop as quickly as you can, just in a panic, and then eliminate one of the threats so you can focus on the others.

And this generated a very hostile, erratic, rapid German economic and security policy that eventually triggered a couple of wars. That ended the European order, as it was until World War Two. And it was only with the creation of the European Union and NATO where the Germans were no longer, viewed themselves as surrounded by enemies but surrounded by allies, that this finally changed, of course, that shaped their economy because they still have that built in.

And so they focused everything on industrial activity because that’s what they knew. And because the frantic miss in the culture never really went away. They just focused it differently, which was triggered some of the economic problems that the Europeans are having. Now. You can play this for any country. Open borders means you have to have an army and you’re going to be a little nervous if you’ve got a rampart between you and everyone else, like, say, the Chileans versus the rest of the world.

With, the Andes Mountains, you get a culture that can be very productive, a pretty laid back because you’re not facing any sort of threat on a regular basis. And then everybody in between. That’s for demographic structure. It’s a question of balance among people who were under the age of 18, roughly 18 to 45, 45 to 65, and retired that first category.

Those kids to expensive. And you have to house them, clothe them, feed them, educate them. And for most adults, raising your kids is the most expensive thing you will ever do. Certainly more expensive than purchasing a house, but it does generate a lot of consumption, which generates a lot of economic activity

Next group, 18 to roughly 45. These are your young workers. These are typically your parents. And just like with the kids, lots and lots of consumption because they’re buying homes, getting educated, and, buying cars. So we have a relatively low value added workforce, but still a lot of consumption and a lot of inflation, and you got people 45 to 65. The kids are moving out. The house has probably been paid for and they’re preparing for retirement. They’re also paying a lot of taxes because they’re experienced workers that are very productive with high incomes.

So this is the tax base. This is the capital stock. This is the stock market. And then when you retire whatever assets you’ve accrued, you want to protect them. So you move out of things that are relatively risky, like say the stock market and go into things that aren’t like cash or property, and then you basically just whittle away at it until you pass on.

Every country has all of these categories. The question is the balance. If you have a lot of young people, you have a consumption led system that tends to be inflationary. It’s also easier to build an army. If you have a more mature system, you’re going to have a little bit more capital, a lot more industrial capacity. It might be easier to do a Navy.

It’s got an advanced population 45 plus. The capital you have is massive, and your ability to invest in technology and be making yourself a technocracy is a very real possibility. And usually countries that are in this stage have some amazing growth patterns. But it’s not from consumption, it’s from investment, it’s from technological breakthroughs. It’s from the application of those technologies.

And then eventually you retire and everything stops. What does all this have to do with leadership? Well, very little. You can’t leader your way out of your borders without a war. And while wars do happen, consolidate and whatever the territory on the other side is a multi-generational thing. And the consolidation usually matters more than the conquering.

So when you look back at, say, American history, as we expanded westward through the continent, we don’t remember the politicians like Paul King, those who came before that actually expanded the borders very well. We think of the politicians that successively turned the country into something else. On the other side of that, we think of Eisenhower. It’s a different sort of work.

It takes time, and it takes a lot longer than any one leader ever has. Even if you happen to be a despot who happens to be a genius and you take over at age 22 and you rule your entire life, this is the stuff not so much of decades, but of centuries. Same and population policy. Let’s say we had a really robust population policy that really encouraged large scale childcare to allow workers to both work and have kids.

Well, that’s not going to hit economic headlines for 25 years, because you have to wait for the kids to grow up and become adults themselves. Leaders just don’t change that. But every once in a while, we have a moment in history where the decisions that are made in the short term don’t just matter. But after everything. A great example is Churchill, during the Blitz, could have surrendered, cut a peace deal with the Nazis.

But no, he decided to make his country and unsinkable aircraft carrier and pray that the winds of time would be favorable. It was a gamble. It worked, and history would have turned out very, very differently had he, not me personally. I put Zelensky’s quote to Ukrainian president of, when the Chechen hit squads were closing in and the United States offered evacuation.

He says, I don’t need a ride. I need ammo. That changed the course of the war. And without that decision, this conflict in Ukraine not only would have been over a lot longer, we’d have a lot more dead Ukrainians than we have now, but we’d already probably be hit deep in a war on the plains of Poland.

We’ve been at one of these moments for arguably the longest window, in human history, for these last 35 years. Ever since the Cold War ended, the world has kind of been in this weird little transition period where the old globalized system of the US, built to build an alliance to fight the Cold War, was mostly maintained, and the structures of globalization on the economic side were mostly maintained.

But we’ve all been kind of a holding pattern to see what the United States was going to do. And most of my work, most notably my first book, The Accidental Superpower, is about this dichotomy and how it can’t last, and that sooner or later, the United States is going to move on to something else, whether it’s something internally, something regionally, the Western Hemisphere, or sees something shiny elsewhere.

And this whole system was going to end anyway. But no world leader, no American leader really took advantage of that moment to do something or take us in a different direction. Until now. And that person who is doing something is Donald Trump. But rather than translating American power of this moment into a new system that will last for decades, he seems to be tearing it down.

Which is why we’re doing the series. There’s something else to consider about why Trump has been so successful and is faced so few obstacles. And it’s more than just the fact that the United States military is more powerful than everyone of the allies combined. It has to do with what’s going on in the United States, because our political system is not stagnant.

It evolves, too. And every generation or so, the factions that make up our political parties move around. And in those periods and these windows of opportunity, in these transition moments and these interregnum politics become unstuck. So I would argue that what we’ve seen in the last 15 years is a complete disintegration of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, other apparatus and loyalty system.

In that environment, MAGA was able to hijack and take over the Republican Party quite successfully, whereas the Democrats more or less just dissolved as an institution. We’re in the transition process here. We are not seeing anything close to what the end result will be for the next period of American history. But at this moment in time, the institutions which are based on the parties, which are based on the people are in flux.

And I think the best example I can highlight for that is what’s gone on in the US Senate. No American president has ever had all of his cabinet appointees approved. You have to get confirmed by the Senate with a majority except Donald Trump and phase two. And without a doubt, this is the least qualified cabinet we have ever seen in American history.

And every single one of them have gotten through. We’ve gotten a guy who pledged publicly to turn the FBI into a vindication engine, specifically to prosecute the president’s opponents, confirmed. We get a vaccine skeptic who’s a complete nut job confirmed. We get an agricultural secretary who’s never been on a farm, confirm, and we get a defense secretary whose military experience is limited and has absolutely no experience in policy.

Whatever confirmed all of them got through, all of them got through quickly. All of them got through easily. This is not my army. This is not the power of Trump’s charisma. This is an issue that we are in one of these moments where the institutions are in flux, most notably the political parties in this case. And until that firms back up, the Senate has basically abdicated responsibility and that provides opportunities for others who are much more organized, who are not going through this sort of flux to exercise their will.

Which will bring us to the Russians. And we’ll tackle them tomorrow.

Doors Open for Turkey as the Kurds Disarm

Flag of Turkey overlooking the city of Istanbul

Imprisoned Kurdish PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan, has once again called for the PKK to disarm and transition into a political party, but this time it might actually happen.

As a nationalist Turkey emerged from the multi-ethnic Ottoman empire, the Kurds were isolated and marginalized. The Kurds then formed the PKK in the late 70s, and insurgency has been waged since. President Erdoğan has consolidated power and stabilized Turkey, allowing the military to stamp out any Kurdish insurgencies.

The Kurds are spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria and many of these regions are losing international support and the ability to function. So, the disarming and organizing of the Kurds is more viable now. If it happens, Turkey stands to gain a significant strategic opportunity.

With fewer regional threats and a tided up southern border, Turkey would be able to dominate the region and extend its focus to larger geopolitical ambitions. The only question remaining is: what will Turkey do next?

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 frosty Colorado morning. Today we’re going to talk about what’s going on in Turkey. Specifically a guy by the name of Abdullah. Let’s forget this region or Geelong or Geelong or Dillon. Is a Kurdish leader of a group called the PKK, which is a militant group has called upon his compatriots to lay down their arms and dissolve their military arm, completely becoming a political party.

In his words, the days when, the Turks were oppressing the Kurds are gone and Kurds now have rights, and it’s time to move on. This isn’t the first time he said this. This guy has been in prison since 1999. And you can understand he kind of wants to get out of prison and maybe into something a little more cushy, like house arrest before he dies.

But this time, it’s probably going to work. So let’s dial the clock back and explain how we got to where we are, then look forward. the Kurds predominate in the part of the Middle East that is in southwest Turkey, which is where most of them live.

And then there are others in northwestern Iran, northeastern Syria and northern Iraq, starting in the early 80s, a group formed called the PKK that started a civil war against the Turkish government for independence for Turkish Kurdistan. And, Odilon was part of that process. And again then he was arrested in 1989. In the early parts of the war, over 30,000 people died.

We’re up to about 40,000 in total. Now, 25 years later. And it’s wrapped up in issues of identity for the Turks. You see, in the days before World War one, when it wasn’t Turkey, when it was the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Empire was a plurality government. You had the Turks who were large in charge, but they weren’t a majority in their own empire.

And so they knew that they needed other ethnicities, other peoples, to do everything from keeping the trains running on time, even before there were trains to manning the army. And so there was a relatively robust respect for the ethnic and religious autonomy of every group. And the in this system, the Kurds, just like the Greeks, just like the Serbs, just like the Romanians, just like the Arabs, all enjoyed probably the most robust rights of any minorities in any system in human history, with the possible exception in the early United States itself.

And because of this, this multi-ethnic entity, persevered for centuries. It allowed the Turks at the head of this multi-ethnic coalition to be a world power, to be the world power for centuries. But after century and century and century of military defeats at the hands of the Europeans, primarily as the Europeans industrialize and the Turks did not, the Turks found themselves stripped of a lot of these outer territories that were home to most of these other ethnicities that had joined more or less willingly with the Turkish cause.

And by the time you get to World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there wasn’t a lot left, except for what we know today as contemporary Turkey. And so the Turks changed their governing strategy because in what is today contemporary Turkey, the Turks were over 75% of the overall population. They changed from having a multi-ethnic strategy to a nationalist one.

And Turkey was the land of the Turks for the Turks ruled by the Turks. And if you happen to be another minority in contemporary Turkey, well, you were to shit out of luck. So we had a couple of, up routines, where Armenians were removed from eastern Turkey in a genocide, and ran to what is today contemporary Armenia.

And in the West, you had a willing population exchange between the Greeks and the Turks in the province of Thrace, where they basically just swapped populations. And that took care of most of the ethnic, complications, with the exception of the Kurds, of which there were too many to move and there was nowhere to move them to.

So the Kurds became persecuted in what they saw as their own homeland, because it was also the Turkish homeland. And the definitions have changed. Now you go from 1917 until roughly 2010, 2015, and you had this duology and Turkish identity was are we modern? Are we European? Are we Turkish? Are we Islamic? And those different ideas of identity agreed on one thing we weren’t Kurdish.

So no matter where you were on the Turkish political spectrum, the Kurds were always the odd man out. And that was reflected in their electoral system as well. The Kurds had an independence minded party in the parliament, but no one would work with it. And it was never enough of a vote to really sway the balance of power.

But the ebb and flow of Turkish politics continued, and you basically had it consolidate into two major camps. First, you had the Kamala’s or the European US who saw Turkey as a modern nation state, maybe not quite in the Western model, but pretty close. Begun industrialization, big on militarization, and big on making sure that, everybody’s noses were faced in the right direction.

And so the Kurds were a problem there. On the other side, you had the Islamists who wanted to go back to the old Ottoman roots, with identity being more rooted in culture. And the interior, shifted away from Europe more, religiosity. As a rule, in free elections, the Islamists tended to win because they had more people.

And then you would usually have a military coup, as the military, would decide that they would give strain away from the ideals of the Turkish Republic. This continued into about 2000, with the rise of a guy by the name of Erdogan, who was still, the leader of the country has been for it’s been 25 years now.

Yeah. Anyway, Erdogan, definitely hailed from the Islamist side of things. But over his first 15 years of rule, he largely succeeded in merging the two identities into one. So Turkey is modern and Islamic, is of the countryside and of the city, is of Europe and is of the Middle East. And in doing so he brought both the more, militant aspects of Islamism to heel, made him more of a political force.

At the same time, he tamed the military and, included the secularists in the ruling coalition. Now, this is a very non-Western country, and I don’t want to overplay this. It is not a democracy in the way we think of it. Erdogan is a strong man, but he’s created a degree of economic and cultural unity in Turkey that is really quite impressive, especially considering the history of the country.

The one thing that this all has in common is the Kurds were on the island, the odd man out of all of it. And once we get to about 2015, towards 2020, the fact that the military has been tamed and put under civilian control and that civilian control includes both secular and Islamic elements, the military, instead of having to police the political field, has become far more professional at doing what militaries do.

And so the uprising that the Kurds have had, led by the PKK, of which, everyone is part of, became tamped down, because the military was able to do it, it was able to focus on what it does. Well. So you fast forward to 2025, all of a sudden, turkey is in a new world. Its domestic politics are the calmest and most unified they have been since at least the Ottoman period.

You’ve got a leader who is large and in charge but is getting on an edge. He’s right up there with Biden and Trump. It’s probably not going to be with us much longer. And so it’s time to turn the page for any number of reasons. The PKK is on the outs. And if you look across the border from Turkish Kurdistan to the rest of the Kurdish territories, the situation has changed as well.

Going south into Iraq, it used to be that the Americans preferred working with the Iraqi Kurds to first counter Saddam and then to inject a degree of stability into the Middle East. But the Americans are largely gone. The total number of American forces in all of Iraqi Kurdistan is probably well under a thousand, mostly for Intel operations against Iran.

If you go straight south into Syria, you just had, the first phase of the Syrian civil war wrap up. And at the moment, all of the various factions are attempting to get along and they’re attempting to form a national government. I have my doubts as to whether this work, but I, you know, I applaud the effort. But what all of the factions, whether they are Alawite or Sunni or Arab or Druze, they all agree upon, is that the Syrian Kurds have no role in that. And so the Syrian Kurds are finding them self squeezed politically. And just like in Iraq, the Americans considered the Syrian Kurds to be the primary partners. But the Americans are leaving Syria as well.

So all of a sudden, that diplomatic squeeze and political squeeze is also becoming a strategic squeeze. And the Turks have a very strong opinion about what the role of the Kurds in Syria should be in the role they believe should be zero. And then you’ve got Iran. The Iranians have their own Kurds, but because the Iranians have lost all of their proxies across the Middle East, they’re not in a position to stir up trouble.

It used to be that you’d have Turkey and Syria and Iraq and Iran basically straight, everybody else’s Kurds up while pressing their own. Well, that’s not the math today. So there’s this interesting opportunity for the Turks to actually put this situation to bed forever. And, you know, forever’s a long time. There are complications. Of course. You still have what is, in essence, the largest ethnicity without a state in the world.

But it’s split within four countries. Their prospects are very weak right now. And there’s an old saying in the Middle East is that every Kurd will fight to the last Kurd to determine who’s in charge. And there was a moment during the American occupation, Iraq, where it looked like it might have gone a different direction. But with the Americans largely gone, that is, a period is now over, and the Kurds in each individual region are basically at each other’s throats.

So the the Turkish goal here is pretty straightforward. If you can get the PKK to disarm, if you can fold them into the political process, if you can do this with the blessing of folks like Ocalan, who can oversee it and provide the diplomatic gravitas, to make it stick, then as the militant Syrian Kurds find themselves squeezed out, some of them will try to cross the border into Turkey, but there won’t be anywhere for them to base.

And so they’ll be faced with the choice of going the way of the PKK and folding into the political process, or facing a unified Turkey that all of a sudden has far fewer strategic problems to wrestle with. And they will lose and they will lose badly. And if you’re Turkey, wow. How much has changed in the last couple of years?

Syria has gone, and the role of Turkey in Syria is basically whatever it wants. It will probably be able to occupy portions of the border region, including the Syrian Kurdish territories it wants to do. Something similar is shaping up in Iraq, where the Kurds, if Iraq are no longer a threat, Iran is going to take in the best case scenario, a few years to regenerate its efforts.

And that means, for the first time, since at least World War one, the entire Turkish southern and southeastern periphery is clear. Turkey is an interesting power. It’s by far the most politically unified, economically powerful, industrially powerful, militarily powerful country in its region. But it’s never really had the power necessary to deal with all of its borders all at the same time.

But all of a sudden, three of those borders are pretty much nipped and tucked. There’s still issues to deal with. There’s always Europe and NATO to wrestle with, for better or for worse. To the northwest, the Ukraine war continues to rage. The Russians are always there, and the caucuses are always a mess. But having half of your borders largely taken care of.

That’s great. So it’s just a question of what the Turks decide to focus on next. And whichever direction they go, that’s going to get really interesting really fast. But all of a sudden they’re back is clear.

Of Birds and Bugs

There are two issues we’ll be discussing today: Bird Flu and the new disease outbreak in Congo. These topics are unrelated, but there is a lesson to be learned in their comparison.

A severe bird flu outbreak has egg prices soaring and shoppers reconsidering their breakfast choices. The newly appointed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins proposed a handful of ideas to end the crisis. After consulting experts, she abandoned those ineffective ideas and opted for an aid package that was a bit more informed.

Over in Congo, a new disease has broken out and at the time of recording over 400 people had been infected and a significant portion of those were killed. Usually, the US would have a swift response with boots on the ground trying to get to the bottom of this; however, new Health Secretary RFK Jr. has gutted those teams and crippled the United States’ ability to respond. Oh yeah, and Trump also severed ties with the WHO.

Rollins doesn’t have the background or knowledge on how to address a crisis like the bird flu, but she put forth the effort to learn and change: that is something I can live with. RFK Jr. lacks the same competencies necessary to carry out his role as Health Secretary, but he is too rigid to even attempt to learn and adopt new strategies: that is a level of incompetence that risks catastrophe.

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 Colorado today. We’ve got two completely unrelated topics I’m going to weave together into a little story. The first is here in the United States. It has to do with the bird flu epidemic that has been raging through U.S. agriculture for the better part of three years now. It’s now gotten to a point where it’s just as bad as the really bad one we had back in 2015.

If you remember that far back. Egg prices have more than doubled. They’ve gone up by like 40% just this year. And there’s no reason to expect that to go down at all. Considering how much inflation was a part of Joe Biden’s defeat, relevant topic. Trump, of course, said on his first day he’d put things in place to fix it overnight.

That’s not how it works. So let me explain what’s going on. With the first phases of what the Trump administration proposed, and then we’re we’re actually going to go. So, the chicken industry is a split between boiler chickens, which are the ones that you like, buy pre-cooked at the store, chicken parts or whatever. And then layers and the layers, of course, make the eggs two different functional species.

The bird flu situation is affecting the layers, not the broilers.

Now, among that these chickens because you know, they’re laying eggs have to be kept in a relatively confined place in order to generate the eggs in sufficient density so they can be harvested, safely, effectively, and above all, from a biosecurity point of view, cleanly, however, birds are filthy, filthy creatures.

They are the rats of the sky. And if you have any interaction between them and the outside world, they interact with wild birds and bird flu is a wild thing, and it is endemic in every bird species on the planet. And so any sort of interaction risks getting the bird flu from the wild species into the domesticated species that are laying the eggs.

And that’s really the core of the problem here. Also, the turnaround time from first infection to death is typically less than 72 hours, with only about 48 hours between first symptoms and death. So if you become aware that the chickens in your enclosure that just even a few of them are sick on Monday, you’re going to have the majority of your chickens either diseased or dead, by Wednesday.

So when, Brook Rollins, who is the new agricultural secretary, who has no experience in agriculture whatsoever, I’d be surprised if she owns a pair of boots. She may have never set foot in Iowa before. Not sure about that one. Anyway, her policy background is very limited. She’s a highly ideological person. She serves as an advisor to the Texas governor Abbott.

And basically the sum total of her, recommendations to him is that, other jurisdictions, not the state, other jurisdictions shouldn’t raise taxes. It’s not that I really disagree with that statement, but that’s not a lot to hang your hat on if you’re going to be agricultural secretary, when that is the most scientific of the various, agencies we have.

The way it works in the U.S government is you’ve got three tiers, at your top, you got your political appointees. Those come and go with every administration down below. You’ve got people who are technically, political appointees, and the president does have the authority to remove them at a whim, but they’re generally staffed with people who know what they’re doing with a lot of experience in the industry or the sector or whatever.

It happens to be. A lot of scientists, a lot of logisticians. And usually these people are allowed to go from administration to administration because they’re largely apolitical jobs. And there’s nowhere where that is more true than the USDA. However, they have all gotten caught up at USDA, just like in every other, agency.

And those are people have all been purged. So the people who know how to make the trains run and keep the birds alive, they’re gone. Rollins comes in, she inherits this bird flu epidemic, and she casts around for ideas. And the first thing that comes out of her head, because it was her first briefing, was the biggest issue going in agriculture right now is let’s improve biosecurity.

Let’s improve medication of the birds. And let’s, do mass vaccination of the birds. Now, the surface, none of those sound like dumb ideas, but they’re very, they’re very freshman mistakes for number one. The vaccine. Yes. A vaccine for bird flu does exist, but it’s not through full trials.

It’s never been tested out in a commercial flock. So that’d be kind of a question. Also would cost about a dollar per bird and it has to be injected manually. Now, I don’t know if you guys have ever gone chasing chick chickens, but your typical bird operation in the lane industry in the United States has 3 million of them.

So you have to pick up a chicken, inject it, carry it to another bio, secure facility to drop off, do that 3 million times. Well, folks, from the point that a bird gets the ability to generate eggs to the point that you retire because it can’t anymore is only 18 months, so basically they’d be retiring faster than you could immunize them. Second medication. There is none. Bird flu triggers total organ failure in under 72 hours. So that just kind of goes out the window. And then there’s just improved biosecurity. That’s like I hate to point out the obvious, but if your life savings is involved in a bird laying operation, your biosecurity is the damn best you know how to do because there isn’t a medication and there isn’t a vaccine.

Oh, one more thing on the vaccine. It’s a live virus. Vaccine? Like most vaccine, this is not an MRI, and this is not one of the more advanced ones. It doesn’t leave any biological components in your body. And, you know, you vaccine skeptics, you can suck it. But it does leave, virus residue in your system, which means that that bird will then, at the end of its life, test positive when you’re testing it for bird flu, if you want to export it.

So you can’t export it either. So it’s a dollar on the front end. It’s administration costs, it’s transport costs. And then on the back end you can’t get it’s money to money from your retired birds. Anyway, the churn in this system just means that if you detect bird flu, you just have to kill everything in that enclosure.

And from the point that you introduce a new chick to an enclosure, to the point that it’s laying eggs, that’s only six months, you can’t catch up with that with immunization anyway, despite the fact that the Trump administration has purged everyone who knows these things from the top tier of USDA, Brooke Rollins, despite her faults, isn’t stupid. And so she went out and spoke with people who knew things in the industry, and she realized that the medication and the, immunization angles of her original idea weren’t feasible.

And so she backed away from something that would have just cost the industry a huge amount of money and probably reduced the number of laying eggs, which would have driven inflation higher. Crazy idea. She’s still working on biosecurity, which I don’t think is going to go anywhere, but she was told by Trump to get this under control, she had to announce something.

She realized that everything it could be done was being done. She announced something that was $1 billion, which, you know, in the world of Trump, world is, not a lot of money. And it’s going to provide a little financial support for, the ranchers and the farmers so that maybe, maybe, maybe they can bring some more facilities online.

It’ll have no real impact on inflation or legal aid numbers. This is someone who is out of her depth and is trying to become more schooled on the topic, and is doing the best she can. It’s a degree of incompetence that I can live with that story one. Story two is happening over in Congo where we have a new disease.

It looks like hemorrhagic fever. Whether it’s the Crimean Congo version or Ebola, we don’t know. In fact, the people who have had it tested negative for both of those. It’s something new. Apparently, it’s already infected over 400 people. It’s already killed over 50 people. It seems to burn out in 2 to 4 days, which is a really fast time to kill people, especially if the mortality rate continues to be over 12%.

It seems to be so far. Now, normally this is where Department of Health and Human Services would come in. Normally this is where a group that’s called the Epidemic Intelligence service would rush over there, help set up quarantines, get some tests done and find out what we’re dealing with. But RFK Jr, who was our new HHS secretary, gutted the Epidemic Intelligence Service on his first day.

And he doesn’t like the medical industry and he doesn’t like vaccines. And so the IHS is basically running on two out of its four wheels right now and doesn’t have the capacity to participate. The second organization we rely on is the World Health Organization. But one of the first things the Trump administration was several contacts with the W.H.O..

So as regards this new disease variant, we in the United States are in the complete dark, and we are relying on other countries to come up with information and choose to share it out of the goodness of their own hearts. Brooke Rollins is someone who’s in over her head and is trying to learn. RFK Jr is a waste of skin.

When you look at people either in health or in agriculture, they have a very low tolerance for bullshit. Because if you screw up the health system or if you screw up the food supply chain, people die. But now we have two different examples, two polls, if you will, of what can happen based on the core intelligence and the personality of the person you put in charge.

Competence would be nice, experience would be nice. That would be amazing in both of these sectors. But we’re seeing one approach that involves learning on the job and one approach that involves pushing your own preconceived notions that are based on no facts whatsoever down the throats of everybody. One of these is not a disaster. The other one very well is likely to become one.

Venezuelan Crude Is Off the Menu… But You Can Still Get It Around Back

Venezuelan oil is getting the boot from the US. Well, kinda, sorta, not really. Let me walk you through what’s going on.

Biden allowed Chevron to import Venezuelan crude to help lower gasoline prices, but Venezuela couldn’t meet their election-related obligations and the deal failed. Regardless, Biden’s motives were misguided as Venezuelan crude is such a small portion of US imports.

Trump came along and revoked that Chevron deal and is now focusing on deporting Venezuelan migrants (many of whom are highly skilled).

Regardless of the policy shift, global oil markets won’t be impacted. Venezuelan crude will likely continue to flow to the US, even if it takes a pit stop somewhere else for a “rebrand” – a page out of the Iranians’ playbook.

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 Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about Venezuela specifically. The Trump administration has recently revoked an operating contract that allows, U.S super major Chevron to import about a quarter million barrels a day of Venezuelan crude. This is unwinding some of the things that I think was one of the dumber things that the Biden administration did.

To explain that I need to go back and explain why the Biden administration did what it did. Okay. So step one, if you go back to the transition from Trump one to Biden, both leaders were basically competing for our affections. And in doing so, they decided to do the Great American political thing and bribe everybody. So in his last month in office, Donald Trump pushed through a or two months in office.

He pushed through a stimulus program that put $1 trillion into Americans pockets. And the first thing that Biden did in his first three weeks is do the same thing. So with $2 trillion of stimulus spending, cash put in everyone’s pockets, even though Covid was already and fully in the rearview mirror, and there was no sign that we needed the stimulus at all, that $2 trillion generated inflation over the next two years, which eventually caused Joe Biden some political headaches.

And then he started to obsess about bringing inflation down. But, the Biden team, like the Trump team, has no one on it that can really do math. So they kind of did their best guess based on ideology and past history, of which Joe Biden has a lot, in order to decide what needed to be done. And Joe Biden settled on gasoline prices.

He specifically believed that as long as OPEC was producing large volumes of crude that could then flow throughout the world, or OPEC and other producers, that gasoline prices in the United States would stay under control, and he wouldn’t have to deal with that political headache. It’s it’s not that the math is completely bad. The U.S does have a semi-open energy market, specifically the shale oil that is the vast, vast, vast majority of American energy production is super light and super sweet.

It’s not really hard to refine, but the American Refining Complex was designed for something else back in the 1980s and 1990s when we knew knew that the global crude stream was getting uglier and more sour and more polluted. We retooled our refineries to be the best in the world, which would allow them to take any crude, no matter how crappy, and turn it to any product, no matter how nice.

Most notably gasoline, diesel, jet fuel. Well, shale Revolution came along, turned that math on its head. And so now the United States exports a lot of light, sweet crude and imports a fair amount of heavy sour crude and then makes bonkers money on the difference, taking in cheap crude and turn it into a high end product. Anyway, that was kind of lost for him.

And so he just thought more was better. So he looked at Russian crude and was like, you know what? I don’t like the Russians. And I want them to suffer for the Ukraine war, but I we need their crude to keep gasoline prices in the United States under control. So let’s work out a regime where they can still export their crude, but they don’t get all the cash.

And it was, you know, squirrely, in the case of Iran, something similar. Let’s bring him in partially from the cold so they can officially export more crude in order to keep crude prices under control. And then, of course, the same with Venezuela and now with Venezuela. It was a little bit more of a match up because Venezuelan crude is that heavy sour that U.S. refiners really crave.

But we’re only talking about total production here of under a million barrels a day, with the exemption that was granted to Chevron only for less than a quarter of that. Most of the heavy crude that the United States imports comes from Alberta, our Canadian neighbors. So that’s like 3 million barrels a day. So apples and oranges. Well, not opposite oranges, but like apples and trees full of apples.

In addition, 250,000 barrels a day in a good month, compared to a total market in the U.S. of 20 million barrels a day, didn’t really move the needle very much. Joe Biden got some crap deserved it for, cutting the deal because it basically said that, in exchange for this oil access, the Venezuelan government has to have real elections.

And they didn’t. So basically, Maduro, who is the dictator down in Venezuela, got all the benefits without having to pay anything. And now the Trump administration is, in my opinion, rightly unwinding this. But of course, we have to talk about what’s happening now with the American Venezuelan relationship, because while Biden was all about gasoline prices and probably did it wrong, Donald Trump is all about illegal migration and is probably doing it wrong, because most of what he has been hammering on the Venezuelan government with is about taking back, Venezuelan migrants.

Now, the Venezuelans have a special dispensation from the US government. So while they may have started a flow that was originally illegal, most of these guys are now registered. Now, part of it is really real political asylum, unlike folks who are applying from, say, a Central America. And as a rule, Venezuelan migrants tend to be much higher skilled than what everybody else is crossing the southern border.

Keep in mind that until Hugo Chavez, who was Maduro’s, predecessor, an idol, until Chavez took over, Venezuela in the early 2000. This is one of the most skilled labor markets in the Western Hemisphere, probably third or fourth behind the United States, Argentina and Canada.

So they’re the kind of migrants that we say that we want. Most of them were in some sort of legal system. And now, the Trump administration is sending them home. Maduro agreed to take them. He has no problem butting heads together for people who might be, his opponents. And that’s going to be a little bit of a drama down the line now that the people who tried to get away are now back.

And at the end of the day, the energy thing probably isn’t going to matter too much anyway. One of the things that people forget about crude refining is because the US complex is so good.

Not a lot of places can process Venezuelan crude. So what will probably happen next is what happened before in that, Venezuelan crude will probably be purchased by some Chinese state major, which will be then sold to a middleman and then sold back to the United States and marketed as something that’s not Venezuelan crude. Will be a little bit of a markup because of the middlemen, but the flows will continue.

We’ve seen something very similar, with Iran in the past as well. Anyway, that’s what’s going on. See you next time.

The Russian Reach: Series Introduction

There’s been a slew of US policy changes that the Trump administration has laid out. I’ve done my best to explain away as many as I could with conventional political reasoning, but I’m not sure I can anymore. Today, I’m going to be laying the foundation for a multi-part series on what is happening in Washington.

The list of policy changes is far too long to mention every single one, but some of the heavy hitters are: Ukraine aid suspension, trade tariffs, government firings and bureaucratic disruptions, and major foreign policy shifts. Again, I’ve tried my best to justify these moves using all the frameworks at my disposal, but when the things I’m seeing can’t even be rationalized away with MAGA ideology or incompetence…something more concerning could be shifting in US governance.

This series will explore the departure from traditional American policy that we’re currently seeing, what that means for the future trajectory of the US, and what the actual f*** is going on.

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 Colorado. This one is going to be awkward. I am absolutely not a conspiracy theorist. In fact, I last five years, spent a substantial amount of my time, talking people down from theirs. But, so much has gone down in the last just couple of weeks that I am having a hard time ascribing changes in American policy, both at home and abroad, to a more conventional theory.

This isn’t MAGA policy. This isn’t policy incompetence on the part of the administration. This is something else. And bear with me as I kind of lay it all out. And, we’re going to see where it goes. I’m recording this on the 4th of March, and the two big pieces of news for the day are.

Let’s start with, Ukraine. The Trump administration immediately suspended or suspended, effective immediately. All military aid of all types to Ukraine, including anything that was in transit and had already been, budgeted, paid for and piloted and moved, with the equipment that the Ukrainians would have receive for the United States, they probably could have kept fighting until mid-summer, without help.

Now, a lot of things are up in the air. Geez. Let’s start with explain why this isn’t a Maga thing. Well, people say that all this money has been given, and like, there’s a big truckloads of cash go is like. No, I mean, the total value of the stuff is somewhere between 100 and 50, 285 billion.

But think of it this way. When you clean out your closet at home, to make room for your new stuff after Christmas, and you take it to goodwill. How much do you say it’s worth when you fill out that little form at goodwill? What it’s worth when you bought it. And, what the military has done is basically gone through their old stores of things they haven’t used literally in decades.

Reported them for the cost that it took to to build them and then adjusted for inflation and for about 70% of the total number that is the donation. And so you’re talking about old equipment we weren’t using that was marked at a value that’s probably higher than it ever was worth. Of the rest, 10 to 15% is ammo and more legitimate equipment legitimate is and current.

And then the rest is cash. So really you’re talking about a total value given that’s well under 40 billion, chump change. In addition, the Russians have been pointing, nuclear weapons at me, not just my entire life, but since the 1960s. And they have abrogated every arms agreement that the United States has ever signed with them in every conventional arms agreement they have ever signed with any country, ever.

In the modern era, if there is going to be a war between the United States and anyone over the next three decades or so, it’ll probably be with the Russians. So for having the Ukrainians basically take our hand-me-downs and fight the Russians to a standstill, that’s a national security win and an economic win by any possible measure.

And so I’ve seen that just twisted around and dropped is a problem. And that’s before you consider that we now have, the Trump administration, not casually, but actively, deliberately breaking relations with all of our closest allies up to including the United Kingdom. And now regular calls throughout Congress, not just for this or that, NATO leader to resign or Zelensky of Ukraine, of course, but actually withdraw the United States from day to all completely.

Now, you might be able to say that there’s a strategic argument to be made here, or at least a discussion we had, and that’s fine. But this is just like one of like 20 things I want to talk with you about today. This you know, all by itself this is a problem. The second big one that happened today is the imposition of a 25% tariff on everything coming from Mexico and Canada, Mexico and Canada.

Our number one and number two, trading partners and, everything, every everything that we do in the world of manufacturing is integrated with them across borders. And so by doing a blanket tariff, lots a lot warmer out here than I thought it was by doing a blanket tariff. What that’s basically done is made most American manufacturing, non-viable almost overnight.

No, there are certain types of manufacturing that may in time prove to be exceptions to this. There’s some very high end stuff, like in medicines, maybe. But if it involves anything that you think of as manufacturing, you know, an assembly line, a production floor that basically doesn’t stop, but it’s now no longer viable versus important stuff that comes from beyond North America.

So the biggest winners of this by far are the Chinese, where they already have competing industrial plants from running. And if you look forward to the world that we’re moving to, where the Chinese are disintegrating because of the demographic situation, we have a limited amount of time to prepare for a world where Chinese industrial plant just isn’t there.

And what Trump did by threatening the tariffs a couple of months ago and now implementing them today, is even before today, new investment into the United States in North America had frozen completely because no one knew what the situation was going to be. He introduced what we like to call regulatory uncertainty into the situation. And now that the tariffs are in place and people know what the math is, no one’s going to come here because the economic case is now been destroyed, and that will set us up for a situation years from now when the Chinese system finally fails, where we don’t have an industrial front in place and we’re going to have significantly higher inflation. Trump, of course, loves tariffs. And also today he said he’s going to put a 40% tariffs on all agricultural imports. Now, the United States is a large country that grows a lot of its own food. We’re the world’s largest agricultural exporter. We have a very wide variety of climate zones, but we don’t have all of them.

And so if you go into any supermarket, especially if you’re looking at things like fish, fruits or vegetables, a huge proportion of those in any given season is coming from a different country. We already have a food inflation problem here. And, now we’re going to have a significantly larger one. Those tariffs are supposed to kick in in April.

And Trump has said farmers start producing, but the farmers can’t produce most of the stuff that we import. Because swims in a different sea comes from a different climate zone or relevant to this moment in March looking around me at the snow. You’re not going to grow a lot of food in Colorado right now, so it has to be brought in from somewhere else. Same is true throughout the United States. In winter, we’re particularly vulnerable to Mexico in that. So we’re gonna have a 40% tariff on top of the 25% tariff that’s already there.

That is enough to push all by itself, probably 10% of the American population. Beneath the poverty line. And we’re just getting started.

Let’s talk about those that Department of Government efficiency that Musk is after. Trump is a great marketer. I will give him that. But, you know, the total value of everything that Musk has routed out of the federal bureaucracy that supposedly was all that, you know, really like $30 billion for all the disruption out of a $7 trillion budget that’s so small as to just not be worth my time to even look at.

Or if you look at the employees that he’s fired, right now it’s only about 1% of the federal workforce, and you would have to purge about 20 to 25% of the federal workforce just to knock 1% off of the budget. Most of what’s going on in the budget is entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. It’s not discretionary spending.

And of those workers, you know, there’s been a lot of splash. But you got to understand how organizations work. There’s basically three categories of workers. At the top, you have your political appointees, which are themselves tiered between the folks that are always political appointees that are let go at at the end of every ministration, you have the ones a step down who, it’s their job to make the trains run on time.

And they may be politicized, but they have a lot of back experience in the topic. And then the next level down. While technically political appointees, they’re typically never let go at the end of the administration because they’re apolitical technocrats who make operations function. Now the president has the authority to get rid of all three layers, and he’s gotten rid of Trump, has gotten rid of all three layers throughout every individual agency in the government, even those that are not political at all and have nothing to do with foreign affairs. So, for example, the Department of Agriculture, those firings, if it has to do with provisional employees or permanent employees, are generally have already been rolled back by the courts because the Congress has not given the president the power to fire most of these people.

And so every time one of those cases has come up, they’ve basically the courts have ruled in favor of, the employees. Now that goes for the second class, categories as well, which are the comp patrollers and the internal auditors. You know, these are the people who make sure that fraud doesn’t go into the system and that foreign interests can’t penetrate the system.

Trump fired all of them. Doesn’t have the authority to try any of them. It doesn’t achieve anything from a policy point of view. It doesn’t achieve anything for savings point of view. They will all in time be reinstated, undoubtedly, unless Congress intervenes and says, yeah, they need to go. But what it’s done is, is it stripped out the internal system that the U.S. government used to prevent foreign influence from penetrating?

There’s nothing about that that matches with MAGA goals. And then the third category are not your provisional employees. Those are the ones that are new and don’t have full civil service protections. Those might be able to get fired a little bit. But the temporary ones, the government does a lot in a lot of places. And you hire people temporarily to do things that don’t need to be done all the time.

So for something that’s near and dear to my heart, the Forest Service, you know, staffing all the national parks that surges in the summer, firefighters, those people have all been let go. So when we get to summer driving season this time, in a couple of months, a lot of the national parks probably aren’t going to be able to open.

And if we have forest fires years, fuck, that’s going to be awful for fighting forest fires without forest fires. Oh, anyway, well, that’s inconvenient. There’s a lot of things that these provisionals do that it’s a little bit more important, like maintaining the nuclear arsenal. Trump just fired them all. That’s doesn’t serve a mark, a goal, or in the food supply system.

You know, people who are in USDA, Department of Agriculture, you know, they don’t tolerate a lot of bullshit because they know if they screw up, people die, like by the tens of thousands. We’re no longer testing food safety because those are temporary jobs. And so we no longer have an eye on the bird flu epidemic because we’re not able to collect the information that we need.

Now, the midterm solution to all this is to just hire a bunch of contractors to do it all. But that means you’re paying for the old bureaucracy that they’re not using, and you’re paying extra cash to create a new private bureaucracy. It’s it’s expanding the budget, not tracking it. And we’ve seen that in the headline figures, with all the firings, with everything that Deutsche has done, the U.S. budget expenditures have gone up compared to the Biden administration.

Has to dodge. We basically have a lot of people without congressional authority and without security clearances that have gone into very sensitive databases, sort of posting things on social media. We’ve got lists of government assets around the world, some open, some covert that have just been released to the public. Stuff like this is if it gets in the hands of other states, that’s like the five year effort of espionage.

And it was just handed out. That doesn’t serve anyone’s agenda in the United States. What else? I got to look at my list. I’ve got a long one.

All right. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stopped investigating terrorism in order to focus on illegal migrants. What? Department of Health and Human Services isn’t even holding the meetings that are necessary to start the process for selecting the next flu vaccine, which has the medical community freaking out because they rely on these private groups to, at no compensation to themselves, advise the government as to what type of vaccine is going to be needed based on the flu strains that are circulating.

And since HHS also cut connections with the World Health Organization, we’re just kind of guessing at what is out there and literally relying upon the kindness of strangers to tell us what we need to get ready for.

All right, USAID, that’s the agency for International Development. That’s got a lot of crap for doing some strange things. That’s fair. But if you’re not going to invade or occupy a country, USAID is the primary method that the United States uses to influence countries around the world. You can call it whatever you want. The bottom line is, when it’s not present, the Iranians, the Chinese and the Russians absolutely dominate the space because they will step in with relief support that is loaded with intelligence operations.

And all of a sudden they’ve gone from meeting USAID head to head to having a completely open operating environment. And so, of course, the Iranians and the Russians sent a joint letter to the Trump administration thanking them for making life so much easier for them. Or in the Defense Department, we canceled all operations against Russian cyber activity.

That includes, defensive operations on our part, as well as offensive operations to disrupt their ability to hack the United States. The Russians maintain a very active cyber presence. They’re not just hacking our elections and our media and our power grid and our water and our food supply and the stock market. They’re going after you specifically because part of the Putin alliance that rules Russia includes organized crime out of Saint Petersburg.

And so most of those cyber things are linked to Russia in one way or another. And we have basically decided just to lay back, open our legs and let whatever happens happens. This isn’t MAGA policy. This isn’t toddler syndrome. This isn’t this isn’t even incompetence. This is too much, too soon, too holistic. This isn’t an abdication of American power.

This isn’t mismanagement. This is a deliberate disassembly of the building blocks of American power and security and safety. This isn’t anything that I would think that any American would ever want, much less orchestrate, which has pushed me into the realm of some computer, some conspiracy theories. I think we now need to consider that the Russians really have penetrated the white House.

And while I think it’s a stretch to say this is like a manchurian candidate sort of situation, there are too many things happening that seem too tailored to hobble American capacity, long run, and everything that was on this list is something that the Russians have tried before. NATO is something they’ve been trying to destroy since the 50s, and now we have a possibility of the US just walking away.

The military has been the bulwark of global security, and so gutting it from the inside is something they would love to see. Our Intel system has been the canary in the coal mine, and it appears that Trump is either not receiving or not reading the daily briefs at the agency produces for him every day. The food supply situation in the United States has long been the world’s safest.

And now we’re not even testing to maintain it. The demographic of Russia is one of the main reasons why the Russians are facing such a bleak, long term future. But if you interfere with the vaccine schedule in the United States, you can start increasing the death rate in Americans not just under 20 but under five, and start to equalize that situation.

This is some heavy stuff. And what we’re going to be doing in the next few videos are exploring all of this from the Russian point of view, how they see the world, how they influence the world and given the chance, how they would redirect American policy to serve their interests. I would love to say this is hypothetical, but I’ve already got a dozen examples in addition to the ones I just shared with you about how that is already happening.

So buckle up, because for the first time since I started doing this 25 years ago, I’m actually worried for the United States. We’ll talk about that too.

From the Frontlines in Ukraine to Truth Social

Ukraine solider on a armored vehicle with a split screen of Donald Trump

There’s a lot going on in Ukraine right now, so let’s do a quick update on the military and diplomatic developments.

On the military front, Ukraine’s ability to jam Russian glide bombs is improving, which has been a critical tactic for Russian success in the war so far. Ukrainian forces are targeting Russian supply routes in an attempt to bottleneck logistics. So far, these efforts seem to have stalled the Russians and opened a window for Ukrainian counterattacks.

Things on the diplomatic front are somehow fuzzier than on the frontlines. Trump’s Truth Social post (shown in the video) aligns with Russian disinformation and goes to show how Russian propaganda has been adapted to appeal to Trump personally. Trump’s inconsistent views/takes/posts make it impossible to predict his future stance on Ukraine.

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, a lot of you been asking with good reason, for updating what’s going on in Ukraine. And, let’s split into what I know, and then just what else? What I know is what’s going on in the front, which is weird, because usually that’s the hard part. The Ukrainians ability to jam the glides systems for something called glide bomb has really gotten good.

Now, if you go back about a year, year and a half ago, one of the things I was really worried about is that the, Russians were dropping these mass sieve, in some cases over 1000 kilogram bombs, with glide kits on them. Glide kits, like what the United States has been using with our JDM system since the first Gulf War back in the early 1990s, which was giving them a range of 20, 30 miles beyond the point that they drop the weapon in the MiG, the drops, it just veers off and, you know, it’s safe.

And then you get a blast radius that sometimes it’s like a third of a mile, just absolutely demolishes any sort of fixed, fortification and stuns the hell out of the defenders. And then the Russians would come in with one of their meat assaults. And in doing this, they were able to take over the fortress city of, the Deepika, last year and were closing on per cross this year. And if they’d seized Picross and they’re just a few miles away, that would have basically broken the Ukrainian line in the Donbas. It’s the middle of a series of fortifications, and it’s a logistics hub. So if with Picross, they can go north and south up the line with up across, they have to go back a few dozen miles to get to another line, to transport things up and back and forth.

For the Ukrainians. They will try to keep this war as a war of movement because they have fewer troops and better troops, whereas the Russians are more, a stagnant fighter. And so they can engage in more points, just not as well. So if the ability of the Ukrainians to move had been inhibited, it would have been a real problem.

The jamming seems to have made the tactic that the Russians were using for the last year less and less effective. But that’s kind of piece one. Piece two is the Ukrainians have, using not necessarily new technology, just applying a little bit differently determined another, strategy for mucking up with the Russians logistics, not just going after things like fuel supplies or ammo dumps and things like that, but they look for an important intersection that the Russians have, and they take out a couple vehicles there.

And then a couple of days later, they take out a few more, and a couple days later, a few more. And eventually you get this, carcass field of vehicles that the Russians are forced to send out things like tow trucks, and then you hit the tow trucks. And so you just get this ever mounting line of vehicle debris that forces the Russians to detour ever further around.

Once they go through the fields, they might. You have to deal with the mud season that is Ukraine is so famous for in the fall and in the spring, and in the other seasons eventually gets so choked they have to use the transport options all together. These two things together have basically stalled the attack on cross and even the Russian counterattacks on Kursk and the case of a cross have even allowed the Ukrainians counter-attack a little bit.

Not saying that the danger is past, but it’s a it’s a different kind of fight now. So that’s that’s the military look at the moment, diplomatically, everything’s all over the place. Let me show you this little thing from Truth Social. That’s Donald Trump’s personal version of social media. This is what he posted last week about Zelensky.

When Zelensky said that Trump was living in a Russian disinformation bubble, which you. Yes. And it’s proven by this, document here. Everything it’s highlighted in red is something that is an oldie but goodie from Russian propaganda going back the last three years. These are the points of Russian propaganda have been hit, man. Month after month after month, after month.

The yellow ones. Those are things that were new, when Trump was reelected or elected the second time. Probably a better way to phrase that, the Russians changed the tenor of a lot of their propaganda to appeal to Trump personally. Basically, they took Trump’s lies and they made some of those integrate with their own. And these yellow parts of some of the newer propaganda.

But what really had the Russians salivating when this Truth social post comes out, or the bits I’ve circled? Because these are Trump’s words, these are not things that were plucked wholesale from Russian disinformation. Instead, they’re places where the Trump has the Trump. They’re places where Trump has taken, Russian disinformation and put it in his own words.

Whenever Trump uses quotes or all caps, that’s him channeling himself. You buy guns anyway. And so the Russians see this, and they’re just giddy because getting getting a foreign leader, any sort of foreign policymaker to use Russian disinformation is always a win. But when the foreign policy maker is using the updated stuff and put it in their own words, that that’s kind of a gold standard for espionage, basically getting the other side to do things your way for you, but them thinking it’s all their idea.

So when this came out, I was kind of like, what the hell is going on? It’s like, I know that Donald Trump has gutted the upper echelons of the Defense Department and the CIA and the FBI, and he’s appointed someone who’s a Russian agent to basically be his premier intelligence filter. But the idea that he would just be so out of it as to just wholesale garble down and then regurgitate back Russian propaganda, had me really worried.

And then on, a week later on Thursday, Donald Trump, when he was, when somebody asked him about what he said was specifically, Zelenskyy being a dictator, he says, did I do that? I don’t think I said that. He just kind of moves on. So the number one thing to remember about Trump is a track record means nothing.

Consistency means nothing. Whatever comes out of his or goes through his head comes out his mouth. There is no consistency. He changes his mind all the time. I don’t mean to say that this is a good thing, but it means that no matter what you think about what Trump is or what he says, it’ll change tomorrow. The Ukraine war to this point has been one of the most dynamic conflicts in history.

I never expected the Ukrainians to do so well. I never expected the Russians to do so bad. I never expected the Europeans, to get involved. I never expected the American hands to get involved. This war has been one surprise after another. And that’s before you consider that the technology of the conflict is evolving so quickly as we move from the industrial age into the digital age and the rise of drones, and probably in the not too distant future, AI systems courtesy of Donald Trump.

The diplomatic side of the Ukraine war is now just as dynamic. And so everybody, no matter whose side you’re on, buckle up.

It’s about to get a lot rockier and a lot weirder.

Economic Troubles for New Zealand

Photo of the skyline of Auckland, New Zealand

New Zealand has been having some issues, with a 1% economic contraction and roughly 80,000 people leaving the country. What does this mean for one of my favorite countries?

New Zealand is a service-driven economy, but its two key industries – tourism and agriculture – are facing some challenges. The weak Kiwi dollar is great for tourists, but its straining local affordability. The dairy sector may be the most efficient in the world, but a collapsing China will cause major issues for exports.

While there are some hills to climb, it’s not all bad news bears. The Kiwis have stronger demographics than other developed countries and New Zealand could be a haven for skilled workers looking to escape collapsing or struggling countries.

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 Queen Charlotte Walkway. That’s the king of Peru sound behind me. And today we’re going to do something that all my Kiwi followers have been screaming for for the last few weeks, which is, you know, do one on New Zealand already. So here we go. New Zealand’s in a bit of a recession right now.

Contracted about 1% in the last quarter that we’ve got data for, which doesn’t sound like much, but that’s like half as bad as what happened during, say, the subprime crisis in the first year. So, you know, it’s if this was in America, we would all be freaking out. And, so let’s look at the economics, let’s look at the demographics, and then let’s talk about the context.

So first, the economics, the, the, Kiwi economy, much like everybody else in the first world, is largely services driven. But the two more dynamic sectors in here are agriculture and tourism. Tourism participant has been driving up prices because we’re in a situation right now where the Kiwi dollar is the lowest it’s been in quite some time, which is it for me, but it means lots of people come in and consume lots of things that the locals otherwise would, housing an especially short term in rental housing.

Sorry. Not sorry. Driving up the prices for everybody else. When you have a situation like that, people get a little antsy. And, because the currency is weak, they’re getting more business, but earning less for it. It’s a little stressful, and people tend to leave. And so 80,000 Kiwis left last year, which, again, doesn’t sound like a lot, but this is a country of only 5 million people.

So you’re talking about losing basically a quarter of the percent of your population in one year? The only California’s worse than that, of course.

Anyway, that’s a lot to lose in one year for a country, primarily young and skilled people. Their destinations tend to be Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, in that order. You go to places where there are jobs.

It’s just that simple. Okay. Anyway, tourism, obviously something that it works very well here at the wine is good, the food is good, the land is good. It’s just a beautiful place with wonderful people. But if you’re doing more and earning less for it, you can see how that can be a problem. Second big sector agriculture.

Huge, new Zealand is a primarily volcanic soil, and many of the volcanoes are still active. I hiked on two of them earlier in this trip. And it’s, positioned where the local wind currents bring it. Lots and lots and lots of moisture. In addition, it is surrounded by relatively cool water oceans. You put that together and you never have a hot summer, and you never have a cold winter.

And fertile soil, plus lots of water. Anything can grow, and I mean, anything can grow. So the New Zealanders have some of the lowest cost of production per unit for agricultural products in the world, and only have 5 million people. So they can focus on quality, they can focus on value add. And the sector that has seen explosive growth over the last 4550 years is dairy.

Once the Kiwis left being part of the Imperial network that the Brits had built and went into business for themselves, they switched almost wholesale from things like sheep to dairy because they just have a huge competitive advantage. They never need enclosures. They never need shelters in the winter or the summer, and they can just rotate the cattle around, always giving them fresh food.

Only in the last few years have they started growing corn themselves to use a silage to increase their productivity even more. But even before they had done that, New Zealand dairy was generally considered the highest in the world in terms of quality and could be produced, at the lowest cost of any dairy in the world.

In fact, they have about a 30 to a 40% price advantage over the country. That’s in second place in terms of efficiency, and that’s the United States. And we only do that with massive enclosures and sheer numbers and lots and lots of, inputs, such as silage, in order to make the cows grow quickly and produce a lot, the Kiwis don’t have to do that.

They’re starting to. Which means there are additional efficiency gains to be gained. And you should expect both tourism and agriculture, especially dairy, to continue to grow in percentage terms that are just not possible anywhere else in the world. And yet, 80,000 people left, were experiencing here the tail end, the final days of the China boom. As the Chinese demographic situation completely implodes.

And there’s a combination of political incompetence at the top of the Chinese system and globalization and trade pressures from the wider world basically break the Chinese system and dissolve the country as a functional entity. Everyone who sells to China is enjoying these last few years were basically at the top of the bubble, and then that market just goes away.

And that’s going to hurt the new Zealanders as much as it’s going to hurt anyone who sells into that market. And we will have to have an adjustment in production capacity around the world. Now, countries like New Zealand, where the efficiency is through the roof, are the ones who will come out of that in the best place.

They’ll push the higher cost producers like, say, the Brazilians and the Russians out of the market in places where they compete. And we’re going to see that in industry after industry after industry moving forward. Okay. Let’s talk about the people.

New Zealand has the highest birth rate in the rich world and the highest birth rate in the advanced developing world. Better than India, better than Mexico, better than Turkey, better than Indonesia. Is one of the very few countries in the world where the cost of living for young parents is sufficiently low, and the availability of suburban and rural land isn’t just there, it’s there, and it’s attractive to live in. That helps keep family formation robust, that helps people marry and have kids when they’re still in their 20s.

The old model that we think of the United States as having dissolved back in the 60s, in the 70s and in, say, Europe much before that, still holds here no matter where you go in New Zealand, there’s lots of families with young children, and yet 80,000 young people still left. Last year. So whenever you have a period of economic distress, people will go to places that allow them to deal with that economic distress.

New Zealand’s primary problem is that it’s small and so any of the trends that are hitting in the wider world when they do hit New Zealand, there’s not a lot of else in the system to absorb the disruption. And so people flow, Australia, because they’ve got a a deal called the Common economic policy, something like that.

Yep. I think that’s right. Anyway. And then, of course, they’re still part of the Commonwealth so they can get into Britain. And everybody, who is white is generally allowed into the United States for limited periods of time. Looking forward, you know, what we’re do to looking forward from a different viewpoint.

Okay. We’re going to finish this video from, Queen Charlotte Sound. So 80,000 Kiwis last year relocated to other countries, which is a record. And that sort of population movement in the face of economic dislocation is about what you would expect. People go to where they think their prospects will be better. Now, I may be very bullish on New Zealand long term, but it’s a small economy.

So if there is a disruption in the global system, in tourism, agriculture, they’re dependent on the global system. People will look elsewhere, at least temporarily. But we need to think about this on a much larger scale, because New Zealand country with 5 million people is, if anything, the canary in the coal mine of the disruption to come.

At the end of the day, I think the Kiwis will be fine. More than enough food for themselves, no security issues to speak of. And, because they’re so far from the East Asian landmass, they can access energy either from the Persian Gulf or from Southeast Asia, or from North America or from South America. So, you know, the lights aren’t going to go out here no matter really what happens.

Other countries are not nearly so lucky. The demographic situation in places like Germany and China is just atrocious. We’re talking about national oblivion here with, their economies ceasing to function in the way we define the term, within a decade, probably with the worst of it in China happening within five years. Germany might have a little bit more time, but only a little.

And that’s before you consider globalization. Germany and China are both export driven systems, and as the world ages, its ability to buy stuff is going to shrink. And that’s before you consider politics or trade disruptions due to changes in trade policy. So you’re going to have a lot of Chinese, a lot of Germans, a lot of people from other countries looking for greener pastures, in many cases literally.

And the people who have degrees that are useful in an industrializing environment, and, are mobile are the ones that are likely be able to take the most advantage of, especially if they’re under 50. Because just because the Germans are dying out doesn’t mean that there are no Germans under 50. And the German educational system still cranks out top talent.

It’s just that there’s not going to be much opportunity for them at home. And if you look back through history, there’s nothing about this that is unexpected. The Germans throughout history have had booms and busts triggered by changes in the geopolitical environment, the one that is most relevant to this conversation, the one that is most relevant to the United States, is what happened in the 1840s with the German civil wars at the onset of the industrial period.

There you had, over a million Germans leave Germany for American shores, increasing the country’s population, our country’s population by 7 or 8% in less than a decade, from just that one influx. And in doing so, we developed these two little things that today we call Illinois and Texas. So bringing in millions of people who know how things work and how to build things, can drastically change a culture and economy in a short period of time.

Now, the United States today has 330 million people. The sort of influx it would be necessary to jar the system. It would be pretty big. But there is going to be a very, very large supply of Germans, of Italians, of Koreans and Chinese, and the rest, to take if you can take advantage of that, you solve many of the Americans problems in terms of workforce, industry and demographics and a fairly short period of time and if we don’t, we have to figure out how to do everything without the skill sets, and that’s going to make everything more expensive.

So watch the Kiwis. In many ways, they are leading the way into something that might work in the future, and the problems that they have identified are ones that are going to be much bigger elsewhere.

And in a world of globalization and the population, the Kiwis are the ones to watch.

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

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Transcript

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