Congressional Midterms: Electoral Bloodbath or More of the Same?

There has been plenty of public frustration over Trump’s policies and actions, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to political momentum. With only one-third of Senate seats even contested, a major shift isn’t going to happen. Both parties are stuck in a dysfunctional cycle, so we’re likely going to see more of the same rather than an electoral bloodbath.

On a longer timeline, we’re very clearly heading towards an entire political system reset. Just remember that we’ve got a lot of a runway in front of us…

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado today. We’re taking a question from the Patreon crowd. And specifically, are we going to have an electoral bloodbath in the midterms? 

Let me go with a partial no. And a big I don’t know. First the partial no. Keep in mind that if you want to change the math on the big issues, like, say, impeachment, it’s not the House of Representatives that matters. 

It’s the Senate. And only one third of senatorial seats are up for election every two years. So even if we have just a swing massively in the direction of the Democrats, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Donald Trump is facing a third impeachment attempt. That, or I guess would be the first one to be successful. Third time’s a drama, whatever you want to call it. 

Anyway. So unlikely. Second and far more importantly. 

The Democrats are a mess. Let me put a few things into context. If you are not just a Democrat, but an independent like me, or maybe a moderate Republican or an old school Republican on national defense and business issues, there’s a lot going on right now for you to be more than a little annoyed with, we basically have a breakdown in the military in terms of its functionality because of, the Defense Secretary’s purges. 

We have a Russian agent in the white House that’s running the intelligence system. We have a a guy at the FBI who’s basically destroying domestic law enforcement. We have a guy of health and Human services which is breaking down the vaccine system, which keeps us all safe and healthy. And we have a policy that has basically been in and out and in and out and in and out of terrorists and trade wars ever since day one of this administration, especially since April 2nd. 

And so our expansion of our industrial plant has come to a screeching halt, and we’re seeing attacks on higher education that are basically shutting down the pipeline for skilled labor into the country that comes from that used to draw the best and the brightest from the world over. And we’re in the early stages of seeing significant rises in labor costs, which are making the construction of things like new homes almost impossible. 

And we have 50% tariffs on copper and aluminum and steel, which are the things you need if you want to build housing or industrial plant more generally. And we’re setting up for a significant economic downturn over the course of the next year in an environment where we should be experiencing boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There’s a lot for a lot of people to be angry about. 

And yet none of it is resonated politically. Trump’s not like dominating the polls or anything, but he’s hanging in there and he’s continuing to do things that piss off a lot of people and facing absolutely no meaningful blowback in that sort of environment. Only one issue has risen to the point that it actually seems to concern him. And that’s the Epstein scandal. 

This seems to be the only issue that the Democrats are getting any traction on. And if this is as good as it gets for them, it is difficult for me to imagine, in a world 18 months from now, where we have a significant shift in political views in this country now, Americans are fickle in their politics. I don’t consider this, a forecast, but all of the normal things that we have seen during my entire life of watching politics just don’t seem to apply right now. 

The Democrats are rudderless. They’re leaderless. They’re unable to mobilize anything in Congress, despite the fact that we almost have a 5050 split in both houses. And even at the state level, we just don’t see anyone rising to the occasion. Now, if you’ve been following me for a while, you know, I’ve been talking about the disintegration of both political parties for some time. 

The Republicans have basically degraded into a one man cult of personality, of which the business community, the national security community and the law enforcement are not part of. And the Democrats have basically just become a circus without a tent, in that sort of environment, 

The opportunity for a broad reset of the American political system is inevitable, but inevitable does not mean imminent. And building parties in the United States takes time. The way the Constitution reads is each of the 50 states has their own party that can, in coalition form, a national party. We haven’t started to build an alternative. 

Today’s Trump Republicans or today’s chaos Democrats. And until that process happens, the midterms will be basically a redux of what we’ve seen the last three election cycles, which is very, very, so electoral bloodbath. I don’t see it broad electoral reset over the remainder of the decade. That’s a different question.

Tomahawk Missiles for Ukraine

Picture of a Tomahawk cruise missile mid-flight

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the US has been trying to figure out the appropriate level of involvement. Tomahawk Missiles would be quite the game-changer for this cyclical conversation.

Ukraine’s current long-range drones are built for carrying out pinpoint strikes on smaller targets. So, a ~1,000-lb warhead with ~1,600-mile range wouldn’t just be a small step up, it would be a leap. But we’re not just talking about handing over the Tomahawks and waving good-bye, the US would have to give prototype US launch systems that would be used in directly targeting Russia.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Comedy from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page. Specifically, do I think that the Trump administration is going to send a Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine? And if so, what sort of damage would they cause? Let’s start with the damage. Then we’ll go to the decision. Ukrainians would love to get their hands on tomahawks. 

Now, the Ukrainians have, shown no shortage of creativity and ingenuity when it comes to developing their own drone program. They now have drones that can regularly go several hundred miles. And they even have rocket drones that can go almost a thousand miles, and have used these things to attack pinpoint targets. But that’s the problem. 

Pinpoint targets, these sort of drones just can’t carry big warheads. So the good for targeting specific pieces of infrastructure? But they’re not good for mass damage. So if you want to say target the distillation column on a refinery grate, you want to take out the entire refinery? No, because those complexes, even in Russia, where the refineries are smaller, are like a quarter of a square mile, and you’re not going to take that out with 100 pound warhead. 

So they send fleets. But even then, you’re not going to attack, a really big building. It’s just not going to do appreciable damage. The Tomahawks, however different, a Tomcat carries a 1,000 pound warhead and can carry submarine mission. So you’ve put 2 or 3 of these into, like a four acre building, and you can basically take out the whole thing. 

They also have a range of about 1600 miles, which is almost double what any Ukrainian drone can do. So the idea is you would use these things, launch them from western or central Ukraine, nowhere near where the Russians could do anything to interfere with the operation. They fly low. They can’t be intercepted and they take out facilities deep, deep, deep into Russia. 

The three facilities that the Ukrainians would probably use these against are all drone production facilities. There’s one near Moscow. There’s one in the yellow book, which is in Tajikistan, which is at kind of the far edge of where the Ukrainians get it with the drones right now and and the third one is further east, getting into proper Siberia. He’s up to, maybe about 1300 kilometers away. Anyway, these are where things like the Shaheed are being mass produced, where the Russians own systems are being mass produced, where Chinese parts are coming in and being assembled. And if those three facilities could be taken out, it would really change the face of the war in a very big way. 

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. And the problem isn’t so much political, because we know that Donald Trump has really no problem with political niceties. The problem is technical. The tomahawk was designed for the Navy. It’s fired from submarines and destroyers, neither of which the Ukrainians have. And even if they did, can’t exactly quickly retrofit something to take a 20ft long missile, that was designed by a different country. 

So these things would have to be put on trucks. Now, the Americans are at the prototype stage of putting Tomahawks onto trucks. The idea was you hand them over to the Marines and they take them out to islands in the Pacific theater. And if a war spins up with the Chinese and you basically have these mobile launch platforms that can basically sink half the Chinese navy before the Chinese Navy even knows that war has been declared. 

Great little program. Problem is, it’s not ready. It’s only a prototype stage. So if the Trump administration was to do this, they would be sending the Ukrainians prototype weapons that haven’t been through the full testing regime in, in order to attack Moscow. Hopefully it is obvious that if that decision was made that we are in a fundamentally new position, not just with this administration’s risk tolerance, but with the war overall. 

So I would argue that this is not something that is going to happen. If it does happen, well, then we are in a fundamentally new chapter, and the Americans have decided to use the Russians as a testing ground. And that is a very different sort of political commitment. Now, the rhetoric out of the Trump administration has changed radically in the last six weeks. 

So I am expecting a significant change. I am expecting more blam stuff from the Americans to go to the Ukrainians. But remember this weapon system in the form that it could be used does not yet exist. So if we do get there, we’re in a new world and we’re using Moscow for target practice.

So, You Want to Invade Venezuela…

Map of a bay of Venezuela

US military intervention in Venezuela keeps getting floated around, but I’m not sure people fully comprehend how UGLY this would be.

Venezuela is a mess. They have a corrupt leader, who has caused irreparable harm to the nation…but getting rid of him is the easy part. Caracas is the Everest of this endeavor, and it all comes down to geography. Sure, Caracas looks coastal, but it sits on a plateau behind 2 miles of tunnels and steep mountains. Translation: it’s not easy to get to.

We are talking about the US military though, so capturing Caracas wouldn’t be difficult. Holding and sustaining the population afterward is the scary part. We’re talking a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar project, with a population that depends upon imports that travel on fragile transit infrastructure. Think of this is a South American Chechnya.

Before I say this next line, allow me to emphasize that this as a VERY bad idea. But if someone was really gung on invading Venezuela, the western port city of Maracaibo is where I would start.

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Transcript

Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about Venezuela because relations between the Americans and the Venezuelans are getting pretty nasty, and people are starting to discuss, I wouldn’t say plan, but discuss whether or not there’s going to be a military intervention. At the moment, I don’t have any guidance on that. The Maduro government of Venezuela is obviously horrendously corrupt and obviously is involved in drug trafficking, if not to the degree that the Trump administration asserts. 

Most of the drugs still come from Colombia up through Central America and Mexico and the United States doesn’t mean that there’s not an important vector coming out of Venezuela, but it’s nowhere near the primary one. But the Maduro government is absolutely involved with the smuggling. So, you know, everybody gets a piece for the right, everybody gets a piece where they’re wrong. 

Let’s talk about what a military intervention would look like. The population of Venezuela, most notably the capital, Caracas, is only a few miles from the coast, which makes it sound like it’s ripe for a maritime intervention or an amphibious landing. But you would be wrong, because there’s a very strong coastal uplift with mountains basically paralleling the coast in that entire section of the country. 

So to get to Caracas, you actually have to go up into the mountains and then punch through a couple of tunnels, one of which is about a mile and a third long. The other one’s a little less than a third of a mile, half a mile somewhere in there. In order to get to the plateau where the city is. 

So four lane highway, two tunnels, which collectively are about two miles long, which means knocking off Nicolas Maduro and his government, is not the hard part. The hard part is then keeping the city and the country alive between the incompetence of Maduro. He used to be a bus driver and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who was touched. This country has completely destroyed their capacity for growing food and even if you remove the government and everything, all of a sudden remembers how to do it. 

You still have a couple of growing seasons before anything would be back on the sheet. So I strongly encourage you to consider what happened back in Iraq when the United States knocked off the Hussein government. Food production plummeted for a couple of years before eventually gradually recovering. In the meantime, the United States was responsible for keeping the civilians alive. 

But in the Iraq scenario, we could ship things in through northern Iraq because Turkey was an ally and there was infrastructure in place. We could ship things in from the south because Kuwait was an ally, and there was a U.S. military base right there, and there was a port, right at the southern tip of Iraq. So there were a number of ways that things could be brought in. 

You don’t have that with Caracas. The food production regions are more deeply in the interior, and you required billions, if not tens of billions of dollars of reconstruction work to bring online. And you have to ship in everything for the capital through this four lane highway. And this is a place that, based on whose math you’re using, imports somewhere between 70 and 80% of their food, mostly ultimately from the United States. 

But that’s another issue anyway. So tunnels, one that’s over a mile long, even a mild explosive by, say, a TV star who decides he wants to stick it to the Americans, shuts that down, and now you’re forced to use a road that was built before 1950 that goes up and over the mountains, which takes a lot longer now, a lot longer subjective. 

If you use the tunnel system to get in from the coast and there’s really no traffic, this is less than a half hour drive. If you go up and over, it’s maybe an hour and 15 minutes. But if you’re talking about a military occupation where the United States is directly responsible for the security and food distribution over 5 million people, that’s a whole nother problem. 

You’re talking about hours and any number of ways that things can go wrong. One of the advantages we had in Iraq that everything was a flat desert road. Mountains are very, very different. Basically, you’d be working in a tropical Chechnya. It would be ugly. And for those of you think that. Hey, air power. Yeah. No, it takes about a thousand times the energy to move a pound by air that it does by water. 

And maybe 100 times compared to what it takes to move by road. And like the Berlin Airlift, which people like to point to, we were flying things from western Germany to West Berlin, which was less than 100 miles here. The nearest airbase is what Cuba, which we’re not going to be operating from. So you’d have to set up some sort of operation on one of the outlying lines, like, I don’t know, Margarita, and then fly in from there and just. 

No, no, no, there’s no way you support 5 million people that way. So knocking off the top cut of the head off a snake, that’s the easy part. Reconstruction is an ongoing issue that would take years, if not decades, and keeping everyone alive from here to there would be just beyond what the U.S. military could handle. If this is not me saying we should do it this way, but if this were to happen, the more reasonable approach would be to do the invasion via a place called Maracaibo, which, if you look at a map of Venezuela, is this big bay to the west? 

It has no escarpment separating from the water. The major population centers are actually ports. It’d be much easier for U.S. forces to operate it. And two other things to keep in mind. Mark Cabo is a major oil producing region, and it doesn’t particularly like Caracas. It never has. And if there’s ever going to be a secession war in Venezuela, it’s going to be Maracaibo trying to go its own way. 

So the likelihood of the population being hostile is much lower, and the likelihood of being able to keep the population alive is much higher. So if if it’s going to be done, that would be the way to do it. Not me saying that this is a Latin American war. That would be fun. It wouldn’t be. But you don’t have to make it a disaster.

Israel-Palestine: Credit Where Credit’s Due

Mural on a wall with a dove with an AK-47 inside

It looks like the peace deal between Israel, Gaza, Hamas, and other Arab States is holding (so far). The fighting has stopped, refugees are returning, and Trump deserves all the praise he’s getting right now.

Unfortunately, this deal probably won’t last. Mostly because it’s the Middle East we’re talking about, and because the core issue at hand remains unresolved.

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Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here. Hi. From Colorado. Happy autumn. Today we’re going to take a look at what’s going on in the Middle East, specifically with this new piece that we’ve got between Gaza, Hamas, the Arab countries of the region, and Israel. I lost the trail. So I’m just kind of wandering through the woods at this point. Anyway, short version is we have a peace treaty. 

The guns have fallen silent. The first batch of refugees have already been returned home. We’re hopeful that in the next few days, the remains of the hostages who died will be return home as well. Everyone has seen something a little bit different, but Trump basically got a hero’s welcome when he addressed the Israeli parliament. 

And, you know, he deserves the moment. So for things about this, number one, so far it’s working. A lot of American presidents have made a lot of attempts to do a lot of things as regards the Middle East in general and Israel Palestine in specific. being able to broker the stop of hostilities, that’s no small thing. And Trump deserves the credit for it. One of the reasons that I’m a political independent is allows me to hate whoever I want to hate. But it also means that when things go well, I get to congratulate whoever I want to congratulate. 

This is an unmitigated success. And Trump deserves the accolades he’s getting. Number two, do I think it will last? Let’s not be silly. And that’s not a Trump thing. That’s a middle East thing. The Middle East, and specifically Israel-Palestine, has a core issue that’s not just about culture or religion. As regards the Palestinians, it’s about land. 

You’ve got two groups of people who claim the same land. There’s not enough space for all of them. And so one has won all the military confrontations that would be Israel. And as a result, the Palestinians basically live on reservations in the case of the West Bank and an open air prison in case of Gaza. Nothing about this deal is going to change that. 

In addition, no one agreed to the same thing. So Trump’s team went to gutter and got an agreement, but they said change A, B, and C, and then that agreement went to Israel where they said yes, but change DNF. And then that was communicated through third parties to Gaza. And they said yes, but change H J and I, no one agreed to the same thing. 

The American teams never went back to the original groups that they had spoken with. They just said they had buy in from everybody. And kind of bulldoze their way through. Now to this moment that’s working. And there have been a lot more organized, capable, functional plans that I’ve seen put up in this region that ultimately didn’t happen. 

This one at the moment is, but it’s built on contradictions and it’s built on everyone agreeing to disagree. And that never goes well anywhere. Much less in this part of the world. So do I think it’s going to stick? Of course not. There’s no version of this where Gaza looks nice. And sooner or later, the Gazans will remember that they live in a ruined open air prison. 

And we’ll have a new round of violence. But whether that’s a day or ten years from now matters for today. Not bad. Third, what was different this time around versus previous attempts? Well, the Israelis are on a military high point, which means it makes for a lot. Number two, Trump really doesn’t care about the niceties of diplomacy, which, in dealing with this region sometimes is a plus. 

But the really big thing is we brought in an outside personality that made a big difference. And that personality is somebody. You’re gonna hate me for this. Jared Kushner, now, Jared Kushner is the son in law of the current president. And in the first Trump presidency, he was kind of shuttling all over the world doing diplomacy. And I’ve seen worse efforts. 

He didn’t achieve very much. But the big difference between this time and last time is he used his time in the office to generate a swamp like, connection for business interests throughout the region. That wasn’t in place last time. And so he was able to leverage his business interests in order to bend the ears of everyone who mattered in the Persian Gulf and in Israel. 

Now, you might call this corruption, and you might have a point. But when it comes to unorthodox approaches, I can guarantee you that anyone who is in the world of business says that they will use their business interests in order to cut other sorts of deals. And that’s exactly what Kushner did. Had Trump stuck with his foreign policy team, which is broadly incompetent? 

This would have never happened. So Kushner deserves all the accolades that he is getting as well. And Trump deserves some credit for realizing that from time to time. Maybe you do want someone on the team who can find the place in the negotiating with on a map. Just maybe. All right. Fourth. And finally, and only because people keep asking, do I think this will get Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize? 

I don’t know. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Nobel Committee based on their own criteria, that they change on a whim and change from award to award, year to year. So in the past, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger got it for, the end of the war in Vietnam or the peace accords in Vietnam. But that happened on the backside of a massive escalation of violence, kind of an escalate to de-escalate some thing which you in Middle East hands know all about. 

So maybe, on the other hand, Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for getting elected, which, you know, talk about how he left. So That is entirely up to the Norwegians, whether or not Donald Trump enters into that sort of category. I have no say in that.

All That Bitchin’ Won’t Keep China Around

A skyline of Beijing, China

We’ve all been there. It’s Friday evening, the office is packing up for the weekend, and the boss decides it’s the perfect time to announce something big. So, I hope you enjoyed your weekend of mulling over the idea of what a 100% tariff on all Chinese imports would look like.

This is a retaliatory tariff in response to Beijing’s rare earth restrictions, but this is bigger than trade drama. China is falling apart demographically, which will domino into everything else over the next decade (ahem, like exports). Whether China-US trade stops because of tariffs or demographics, it is coming soon.

In short, quitcha’ bitchin’ and get ready for a world without China.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is the 10th of October, and it’s just after closing time in Washington, D.C.. And right after everybody closed for the day, Donald Trump said that there’s going to be a 100% tariff on everything coming from China by November 1st, if not before, because the Chinese are putting restrictive, policies on their exports of rare earth materials, most notably to the United States. 

Rare earths are materials that are produced in trace amounts as a byproduct of the refining and mining of other metals, most notably, silver, lithium, copper. You basically have to take the concentrate that’s left over once you’ve gotten the primary stuff and then go through a series of refining steps that are very energy intensive and very polluting. 

And China has cornered that market. So they produce more than 80% of all of these materials. In some cases, it’s a functional 100% monopoly. Anyway, a lot of these materials help other properties emerge in more traditional things that I can be used very heavily in things like defense, materials. And so the Chinese have always found this to be a very useful pressure point. 

They’re also very much used in semiconductors. Anyway, the Chinese have restricted their exports. Trump has said no more and is now basically, saying that he’s going to double or more the tariffs that are in place. And that’s just the beginning. Okay. Now, before anyone makes this about trade or makes sort of Trump, I need to remind you guys of something. 

The Chinese are dying out. They already have more people aged 54 and over than 54 and under, and within ten years they will not have enough people under age 60 to run an economy. So it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter what your producer export or import. 

You need to assume that that trade relationship is going to go to zero. Doesn’t matter if you’re exporting soy or beef or semiconductors or ethane or anything. Zero zero is where this is going. It doesn’t matter what you import from China, whether it’s transformers or wire or process chemicals or fertilizer or anything. It doesn’t matter. It’s going to zero. 

The only wiggle room here is the time frame. Either the Chinese die out over the next ten years and it goes to zero, or the Trump administration puts into place and owners tariffs. And by November 1st, or maybe even before it goes to zero, either way it is going to zero. So everyone needs to plan for that happening. 

Does the time frame matter? Of course it matters. Would I like to have more time? Of course I would like to have more time. But to pretend that this is a purely political question that can be negotiated away is a fallacy. And if that is your position, you’re going to lose everything. So quit your bitching and start your planning for a world without China. 

Sooner or later.

Should China Invade Siberia?

Cleaning the tents in northern Siberia

While the Russians are busy throwing everything they can at Ukraine, could China make a move to seize Siberia?

This is highly unlikely and there’s really no point for the Chinese to make a move on Siberia. Best case, they get some oil fields (which they can’t operate without Western assistance) located in a cold and barren region with limited potential for any growth. And they run the risk of the Russians whacking that scary red button.

If any power wanted to challenge Russia in the Far East, they would need to cut off Moscow from Siberia. This would involve severing the Trans-Siberian Railway and making a move on the choke point in Tatarstan. But again…that nuclear carrot would still be dangling over the invader’s heads.

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Transcript

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon page. And that is with the Russians. So obsessed with all things Ukraine, with all our military force going there, with the dependency they have on the Chinese for military equipment, would now be a good time for China. Just take over Siberia, I think. 

I see where you’re going. But, invading Russia is never as easy. It sounds, three things to keep in mind. Number one, the single most valuable thing in Siberia is the oil and natural gas. And the Russians aren’t the ones who really produce that. You’ve got something called the covector field, which is the general vicinity of Irkutsk, which is by, Lake Baikal. 

And then you have the fields offshore of Sakhalin Island in the Far East. Neither of these are operated by the Russians. They’re very technically challenging projects that are done by Western companies. And there’s still Western consulting work being done in order to allow the production to continue under sanctions. And if that were to end, or if the Chinese were to take over those facilities themselves, the Chinese do not have the technology to operate them either. 

So it would be kind of a wasted effort. So that’s number one. Number two. Population. Yes. There’s only 10 to 15 million Russians in Siberia. But that’s because the carrying capacity of the land is very low. You’re not going to be able to forward stage a population there that can really do much. The agricultural potential is shitty because the climate is so crappy. 

Third, if these reasons do not dissuade you, consider that the Russians still have the world’s single largest nuclear arsenal, and they made it very clear during the Yeltsin years that should the Chinese attempt to invade, that the Russians would not meet them with tanks and with guns and with men, they would just nuke China’s cities. And that policy formally remains in place. 

So if, if if the Chinese decided that they wanted to make a bid for Siberia, what they have to do is prevent the Russians from interfering in the operation. And the first piece for that would be to sever the Trans-Siberian railway. The TSR is a single transport network that allows European Russia to interact with Asiatic and Siberian Russia. 

And if you were to cut it somewhere closer to European Russia, then there’s really not anything the Russians could do in a conventional set to counter Chinese actions or Japanese or anyone coming in from the Far Eastern theater. The logical place to do that cut would be a place called totter Stand, the Tatars are an ethnic minority, the single largest minority 

in Russia and Kazan, their capital, is not only a relatively advanced city. This is not only the educational system that generated Mir. This is not only an oil area in its own right, but it sits on top of the TSR. So if Tatarstan were to declare independence or fall into rebellion in some way, then the Russian ability to manipulate events in the Far East, much less send troops, would be gone. 

And then all that would be left would be the nuclear card. And then we could talk about some really interesting things. No sign that that is happening right now, by the way, same goes on the Ukraine war. There’s a specific city that sits upon all of the connecting infrastructure that links Moscow to the Caucasus, Rostov on Don. 

And if Rostov on Don, which has been a major staging point for Russian forces in the Ukrainian war, were to fall or rebel or whatever, then all of a sudden Russian power in the Caucasus would be shattered and we’d be dealing with, at a minimum, a new Chechen rebellion. So there are these nodes in Russia that really matter. 

But at the moment no one is poking them with any sticks.

Life After Trump: President JD Vance

ance speaking at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina; October 2024 | Photo by Wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JD_Vance#/media/File:JD_Vance_speaking_at_a_rally_in_Wilmington,_North_Carolina.png

Anytime we have a sitting US president that has exceeded the average lifespan, it’s a warranted endeavor to explore what happens after…they bite the dust. So, how would President Vance hold up?

It’s impossible to know exactly how a Vance presidency would play out, but we can draw on some historical parallels. Obama and JFK were junior senators just like JD Vance, so they would all have comparable levels of experience when entering the White House. However, Obama had a nice network of qualified advisors, Vance does not. JFK rose to the occasion during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so Vance could very well do the same in his situation.

Should this all come to fruition, any success will have to come from Vance himself. He surely won’t be getting any (meaningful) help from the circle Trump leaves behind.

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Transcript

Hey everyone, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Los Canyon. This is the famous jumble of Los Canyon. And yes, that is the trail behind me. If you can see it, your has got better eyes than I do. Anyway, today we’re taking a question from the Patreon crowd. Specifically, let’s assume that, 

Donald Trump being 80, does what 80 year olds dies and exit stage, right? 

What would a president JD Vance white House look like? The short answer is no idea. JD Vance is a junior senator. And so you never know, when he’s confronted with real world problems and actually, he’s in charge of something, how he’s going to react. 

But let me point out two things to you. We have two presidents who were junior senators who, became president and they kind of give us goalposts, guidelines. I’m not saying that he would turn out like either of them, but it’s really our only points of reference. The first is Barack Obama. Barack Obama, in my opinion, he’s going to go down in history. 

He’s one of the top ten worst presidents we’ve ever had. His problem was that he was so anti-social that he just didn’t want to have meetings with anyone, including his own cabinet secretaries. And so for eight years, we didn’t functionally have a foreign policy. We had very little domestic policy. We just had a bunch of speeches from time to time. 

The difference between JD Vance and Barack Obama is very simple. Barack Obama did build an independent coterie of people around him when he went to the white House, and then he was able to tap the Democratic Party for expertise to fill his cabinet. JD Vance doesn’t have that option. He was almost a no. One when Donald Trump picked him. 

So he has no independent followers, especially followers who have, skills that could be applicable to governance. And Donald Trump is absolutely destroyed. The Republican Party as a source of talent. So if he were if JD Vance were to become president, he would become president alone with no one around him except for the people who used to hang on to Donald Trump. 

And as we’ve seen from the people who hang on to Donald Trump, most of them are not particularly competent in their chosen fields. So it could be ugly. The other option is JFK junior senator, was at best a mediocre president. Maybe if he hadn’t been killed, it would have turned around. Who knows? But something to keep in mind is the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

One of the reasons that the Soviets pushed when they did is because they thought the American president was weak. A lot of us probably did at the time. And lo and behold, JFK had nerves of steel. And the Cuban Missile Crisis was more or less resolved to America’s, long term advantage. So we can’t rule out that J.D. Vance has it in him somewhere. 

But just like JFK, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen because of J.D. Vance. It will not happen because of the circle of people he surrounds himself with, which makes it overall a risky bet.

Would You Like Some Plutonium with That?

Fragment of Plutonium | Photo by wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Plutonium_%28Element_-_94%29_3.jpg

The US needs to massively expand its ability to generate electricity. A possible solution? Mixed-oxide nuclear fuel. We’re talking repurposed weapons-grade plutonium mixed with uranium. This is complex, expensive, and time intensive. And perhaps more to the point, there’s a proliferation concern. No surprise that Russia is the only country that has done this so far…

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Transcript

Hello. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about an old technology that the Trump administration is dusting off and seeing if it’s applicable for the current environment. The reason is that the United States has just massive electricity shortages right now, and a number of states are on the verge of having, rolling brownouts. 

And we’re not talking here about California. We’re talking about everybody. Trump administration says that it wants to massively expand manufacturing output. We can debate whether the policy that is in place is going to enact that. But I would argue that we need to expand, the industrial plant by at least double in order to prepare for a globalized world. 

Most of the products that we’re used to importing, we’re gonna have to make ourselves one way or the other. Plenty of debate to happen about the specifics of Washington’s policy. But if any version of this is going to happen, we need more electricity. We probably need to expand the grid by about 50%. 

And at the moment, pretty much all electricity expansions in the country are on hold. The Trump administration’s tariff policies have massively driven up the cost of doing everything that is related to the grid. For example, copper and aluminum, the two biggest inputs. And those now have a surplus tariff of 50%. And the government has actually canceled a number of power plants that it doesn’t like. 

Because Donald Trump doesn’t like windmills. So the government, as a partner in the process of expanding the grid, has basically become a burden rather than a bolster. So this new technology, old technology, is something that maybe the government can actually step in, in a constructive way. And it’s called mixed oxide fuel. In essence, you modify a nuclear power reactor. 

So instead of running on a down blended uranium, where, say, 3 to 5% of the uranium is a fissile component, in a broader block of power fuel, you instead use MOX, which is a mix of uranium and plutonium. Whether one technology is better or worse than the other from an economic point of view is very much in debate. 

The only country that uses Mox at the moment for their civilian power systems is Russia. And Russia does it because it had 30,000 nuclear warheads, mostly plutonium driven, as part of its arsenal. When the Cold War ended. And they basically when they decommissioned them as part of arms control agreements, they took all of those warheads and spun them into the fuel. 

So from their point of view, it’s a big savings. As a rule, once you factor in the cost of expanding or modifying your nuclear power system in order to use the MOX, it’s probably a wash for an economic point of view, because the up cost investment is so high. And if you’re going to use it just to use spent military, surplus equipment, eventually you’re going to run out of that. 

You don’t have to have a plutonium supply chain. So a number of countries have played with this technology, most notably Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Japan, also India. But no one has actually instituted as a civilian program. The problem is very simple. Not a lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Not a lot of countries had tens of thousands of them to decommission to serve as an input fuel source. 

Really just the United States and Russia in that regard. Which means that if you want this to work, you have to build a civilian plutonium production system. Now, plutonium does not occur naturally in the world. It’s pretty much only generated as a byproduct of a, you guessed it, uranium power plant. One of the waste products that comes out of spent uranium based nuclear fuel is plutonium. 

So if you want to have a MOX industry, first you have to have a uranium power plant industry, and then you have to have a system that takes the spent nuclear fuel and separates out the plutonium and purifies it. So basically, to have this sort of power sector, you have to have a civilian system that creates large volumes of weapons grade plutonium as part of their supply chains, which explains why most countries have not embraced it. 

The Trump plan would do basically an echo of the Russian plan and take some plutonium cores from weapons that we have decommissioned and convert them to MOX. The problem they’re going to come across in addition to the proliferation question, is the same problem of everyone else who has decided to play this game. It’s a processing issue. You have to take the plutonium cores from the old decommissioned weapons, spin them into a different form in a different geometry. 

it’s a manufacturing issue. It’s a fabrication. And above all, it’s a processing issue. And one of the problems the United States has at every level right now is we don’t have enough materials processing. We need to be able to turn bauxite into aluminum. We need to be able to turn iron ore into steel. We need to be able to turn copper ore into copper wire. 

And if this program was going to work, would need to be able to turn surplus plutonium cores from decommissioned weapons into fuel. So it’s an interesting idea, but there’s a lot of upfront investment that has to be done before you can seriously try it. 

They are hoping, hoping, hoping, hoping to have a little pilot program going by the end of calendar year 2026 to see if it’s even viable. I don’t know if it’s going to be viable, but as part of this process, you also then have to prepare a fuel cycle that puts weapons grade plutonium civilian hands on a regular basis. 

And to this point, the only country in the world that have decided that that’s a good idea is Russia. And Russia, of course, is one of the world’s great proliferator.

A Dark Future for American Agriculture

Large white barn in imploding stage with white concrete silo

Next up on Trump’s chopping block, we have US agriculture. Staring down a broad list of restrictive tariffs, US agriculture is entering a crisis of its own.

Many countries, including China, are now avoiding American farm products. Since a significant portion of farm output is sold abroad, this threatens farm incomes across the board. This is happening at a time where US population growth is stalling, so that lost income can’t be made up through domestic demand.

And as you could imagine, federal relief is unlikely. The USDA and other agencies remain understaffed and unable to navigate this trying time and Trump’s erratic policymaking adds another layer of complexity to the mix. Ironically, Argentina (one of America’s largest competitors in the farm industry) is getting a $20 billion bailout from the US…

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a sunny Colorado day. And today we’re going to talk about the American agricultural sector, which is facing some very, very dark times, as a result of the Trump tariffs on everyone. Most countries in the world have decided that they will never purchase American agricultural products ever again unless they have no other choice. 

Now, there are a lot of countries that have no other choice. Mexico is by far at the top of that list, but Mexico is only one of a number of countries that are of concern for the American farmers. China is obviously the country that they’re most obsessed about right now, because it’s been the number one consumer of most of our agricultural exports, minus Mexico, of course. 

For several years now. And new purchases of American beef and soy have basically stopped. Beef purchases have gone down by over 90%, this year, and soy purchases have gone to zero. And it looks like production cycles in places like Brazil and Argentina are going to be solid enough this year that the Chinese won’t need to purchase any product. 

In those sectors from the United States at all this calendar year. so three things here. Number one, something I’ve been telling American producers for years is you need to prepare for the world where China doesn’t buy any of your stuff. Not because of politics, not because of trade policy, but because they’re dying out. And their demographics are beyond terminal. 

And over the course of the next decade, we’re looking at state collapse. So any business plan that is based on sales to China is one that is going to make you lose the farm. Literally. The Trump tariffs have simply moved that forward. We’re now having to deal with it. Number two is the scope of what’s happening here. 

The American population has not grown very much over the last 30 years. It’s been a very slow creep up. And because of Donald Trump’s, policies that have increased the cost of living drastically this year across the country, as well as driven migration to zero and even into negative territory. Calendar year 2025 will be the first year in American history that the American population will actually shrink. 

Shrinking means no increases in food consumption. So about 95% of the increase in farm income since 1992, when hyper globalization became a thing, has been from selling, not to Americans, but to selling to foreigners, which means that today, roughly one third of all agricultural produce in the United States is exported. And with exports now flatlining, going sharply negative. 

That suggests that we are looking at a massive decrease in the take home for any American agriculture producer. That’s going to be a lot more than one third, because you only eat so much food. And if food becomes cheaper, if all food becomes cheaper because people are dumping it on the local market, you don’t only lose your premium from exporting, you lose income at home. 

So a one third reduction in demand for American product is actually more like a two thirds reduction in income for farms, and we’re not going to see anything quite that drastic, but it is going to be horrific and probably over the course of the next two years, or one quarter of American producers are going to go out of business and the remainder will be under extreme financial stress. 

Which brings us to the third issue. There’s not a lot that the federal government can do about this. There are now conversations going on about using some of the tariff income to bail the farmers. But one of the American bureaus that was hit most strongly by Dodge in the early days of the Trump administration was the Department of Agriculture, and USDA cannot implement the policies it has now, much less design and implement a new one. 

So the ability of the federal government to do meaningful bailouts is almost nil at this point, even if the cash was appropriated by Congress, which is unclear whether or not that would even happen. Even if the money flowed, we don’t have the ability to administrate it anymore. 

And against this backdrop, we are continuing to see policy incompetence out of the Trump administration because of a lack of personnel. Trump’s tell is he doesn’t like anyone in the room to think that they’re smarter than him. And he certainly doesn’t want to think that he’s not the smartest person in the room is very Obama esque in that regard. 

And so the way he dealt with this when he was out of power was instead of turning the Republican Party into a policy arm that could implement his policies, he took over the institution and basically got rid of any policy expert so that he would always be the smartest person in the room from his point of view, which means when he came in, instead of having this cadre of thousands of people that he could use to staff the government to make his vision possible, he came in with almost no one. 

Certainly the fewest number of skilled hands of any president in modern history. And most of the people who he did bring in were like Pete Hegseth, who were just absolutely incompetent in their portfolios. What that means for places like USDA is it’s still not staffed up. Well, neither is commerce. And here is USTR. Neither is energy. 

None of them are, So the president is not getting good policy recommendations. And as we’ve seen recently with his decision to, basically discourage everyone to use Tylenol because it apparently causes autism now because that’s what he feels. We’re getting some of his feels in foreign policy, and one of his feels is that he likes Argentina. 

Because the government there is led by a guy by the name of Malay that who he thinks of as an ideological ally. Now, nothing could be further from the truth. Malay is a libertarian, and Malay personally is just horrified by some of the economic policies that are going on in the United States, where Trump and it’s moving us very rapidly to some form of Argentinian style socialism. 

But that’s a topic for another day. Anyway, since this is what Trump feels, Trump is doing a 20 billion odd bailout for Argentina. Now, I am one of those people who thinks that Argentina is a country that’s going to be with us long haul, and having decent relationships is a solid idea. But, but, but Argentina has defaulted on every debt it has ever had over the course of the last 120 years, and in the last 30 years, the pace of those defaults has accelerated. 

So any bailout for Argentina is money that you simply won’t get back on top of that, Argentina is one of the world’s leading producers of soy and beef, along with any number of other agricultural products. And in the world to come, the single largest long term competitor for American agriculture will be Argentina Freakin Tina. And now the Trump administration is bailing it out. 

And Argentina is preferencing sales to American competitors. Like China, that’s basically shutting American producers out of the market. So farmers are getting hit from a foreign policy angle. They’re getting hit from a policy incompetence angle, their getting hit from a financial angle and demographic angle and a market angle. And really, the only possible way that we exit this next five year period with all of our producers is if somehow the Trump administration works out a French style support system that basically pays the farmers to exist not very American, not very capitalistic, and something that arguably the Trump administration can’t even staff up right now.

A Break for Ukraine

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

President Trump might finally be throwing the Ukrainians a bone, as the US may begin providing the precision targeting intelligence for strikes deep inside Russia. This marks a major shift in US policy on Ukraine.

Let’s zoom out first. For decades, US presidents would avoid actions that could spike global energy prices. Well, that held true through Trump’s first term and until Biden left office, but Trump 2 has shaken things up.

The erratic policy implemented by the Trump administration has been hard to follow, but the Russians have gotten more favorable treatment so far.

Things now seem to be shifting. Trump realized that Putin had been playing him this whole time, so Trump may finally be switching up policy. Couple this pivot with Ukraine’s recent strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and we could see Russian oil exports crippled very soon. This means Russia’s main source of funding for the war would quickly dry up. Places like China and Iran will have to decide if they want to bankroll Moscow without any incentives…

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Transcript

Good morning, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about what’s going on in Ukraine and with the Trump administration. The new news is that the Trump administration. Well, let me rephrase that. Donald Trump personally, says that fairly soon the United States is going to be providing the Ukrainians with precision, targeting information. 

For the Russian energy system deep within the Russian Federation itself. Now, there’s a lot of back story that got us to this point. So let’s handle that before we move forward. The US administration, not just this one, all of them going back at least until the 70s. I’ve always been a little paranoid about energy prices as result of just the nature of economics. 

Energy demand tends to be inelastic. If you need a gallon of gas to get to work, and the price of gas goes up by 100%, you still need a gallon of gas to get to work. So it tends to be something that is very politically sensitive. And as a rule, political leaders, presidents are unwilling to do things that they know. 

We’re going to drive up energy prices. Now that relationship has loosened quite a bit in the last 20 years, largely because of the shale revolution in the United States, which has taken the United States from the world’s largest oil importer to the world’s largest oil exporter, which has some interesting effects on lots of things. But that general feeling remains. 

Now, back during the Biden administration, the Ukrainians started targeting Russian energy assets, most notably refineries, in an attempt to disrupt gasoline and diesel deliveries. The military tends to use diesel. The civilians tend to use gasoline. The idea was if we can stop the fuel flows, the Russians will be able to prosecute the war as much. In addition, the Russians don’t have a lot of storage, so if they can’t process fuel, they have a limited export capacity. 

And that means that they will have to shut in some production. Well, the Biden administration shut that down because they were afraid of the impact that it was going to have on global energy prices, which is not a ridiculous point of view, but I still think it was wrong because the shale revolution has changed of that. But the previous administration really didn’t understand petroleum energy economics, so I can’t say I’m shocked. 

That was the conclusion that they came to enter the Trump administration. The Biden administration was pretty pro Ukraine there just a few things they didn’t want him to do, like targeting energy. The Trump administration has been very erratic. In the early days, they were pathologically hostile to the Ukrainian government, up to and including inviting Zelensky to the white House just so they could yell at him. 

And relations. I don’t want to say they’re in the deep freeze, but they have not been great. Trump, as part of his reelection campaign, tried to convince everybody that he and Putin were best bros, and all it would take was one conversation between Trump and Putin for the war to end. Which, of course, was always really incredibly stupid because the war is happening for geopolitical reasons. 

And the only people think that the Russians invaded because Biden was president are Trump the people around him and some MAGA hardcore folks is the Russians think it’s hilarious that they’re actually Americans believe this. It’s a strategic issue. It’s a demographic issue. The Russians have been pushing towards the Carpathian since the 17th century. It didn’t change because of who was in the white House anyway. 

The Russians have gone out of their way to denigrate the American president, to make fun of them, to call them stupid. In the Kremlin, behind closed doors in European venues with the Chinese. But that information, as a rule, doesn’t make it back to Donald Trump, because Donald Trump has this really weird quirk. He feels that he has to be the smartest person in the room, and he likes to talk a lot. 

So what that means is he has gutted the top of the national security and foreign policy staff to make sure there’s no one ever in the room with him that could tell him something that he doesn’t want to hear, or would make him not appear to be the smartest person in the room, which means he’s basically gutted it completely. 

He’s not using the State Department. He’s not using the National Security Council. He has, however, installed a woman by the name of Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National intelligence, and she has gone through the CIA and the other intelligence bureaus and basically gutted them of the Russian experts, top to bottom. And she’s also the person who has the final say in what goes into the Presidential Daily Brief. 

So she makes sure that anything that makes the Russians look bad doesn’t actually make it into the brief. For example, Putin laughing openly on TV about Donald Trump’s stupidity. Anyway. 

Will this time be different? Because we’ve had lots of periods where Trump has got an inkling that something is wrong, and then Tulsi Gabbard has talked him down, or Putin has talked him down. Maybe, and the reason is because there’s another personality involved and this person is absent or his name is Steve Wyckoff. Now, if you remember back to Trump one, Jared Kushner was all the big deal, smart guy, basically served as a presidential envoy and actually got a few things done. 

For example, the Abraham Accords, which is the sum of the total peace deals between the Israelis and some of the Arab states. Kushner wanted nothing to do with Trump, too. he saw how the sausage was made from the inside. And Trump won. And he and his wife, who is Trump’s daughter, just bugged out. 

And so it’s the dumb sons that are actually in the white House now. Anyway, I’m getting I’m getting off track here. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Wait, wait. Cough. So, what? Cough has no foreign policy experience. And Trump basically entrusted him with the entire portfolio for all negotiations all over the world, all of which have gone really badly. 

So when Wyckoff shows up at the Kremlin, the Russians sit him down. They tilt his head back and they pour gallons of Russian propaganda down his throat. He goes Ben back to the white House and vomits that up in front of, the president of the United States. And that becomes gospel. And that is the primary reason, combined with Tulsi Gabbard, as to why we’ve really seen no movement. 

But things have changed recently because a couple months ago, if you remember there was a summit directly between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and it was supposed to last for several hours, and it was over very, very quickly. Putin thought he had Trump completely wrapped around his little finger. And if you look at policy from the last six months, that’s not exactly a shock. 

But Trump finally realized that this guy had been laughing at him for the whole time. And we started to get Trump looking at other bits of information like, I don’t know, media or talking to his wife. And he started to realize that he had been played the fool and that he was acting like a fool, and that perhaps the only way to change things was to change policy with a wild idea, I know. 

So we now have this, potential change in policy. The Ukrainians have started targeting Russian energy infrastructure again. Again, mostly going after refineries, but going after some pipeline places. And they’ve probably now reduced Russian refining capacity by 25%, which is the most it’s been offline since the Russian collapse back in the 1990s. The post-Soviet collapse. If if the Trump administration actually does what it’s talking about doing US satellite guidance combined with the weapons the Ukrainians already have, would be capable of targeting individual pumping stations anywhere in western Russia. 

And the Russians export about 5 million barrels a day through their various methods, about two thirds of that going out through the Baltic Sea, in the Black Sea, which are all within range of Ukrainian weapons. If you take out just a couple of the 

pumping stations per pipe, those exports go to zero. Now the Ukrainian thinking is if you do that, you basically destroy what has been Russia’s number one income source for the last 30 years. 

Oil exports. And then countries like Iran and China, which have been taking money from Russia and sending them drones and drone parts, will have to decide whether they want to directly subsidize the Russian government’s war in Ukraine. I find that unlikely. Iran is really in some dire straits right now. They need the currency. 

They don’t want to treat Russia as a charity case. And the Chinese, that’s probably a bridge too far, no matter how bad relations with the United States happened to be. So if that happens and the Russians have to fight on their own, it doesn’t mean that the war is over. But it means you have a catastrophic shift in fortunes on both sides. Will this happen? That’s entirely up to Donald Trump. 

He has changed his mind by my math, 77 times since January 20th. Who knows? But once the Intel is provided, for every day that it is there, the Ukrainians will definitely be striking. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians over the last year have been building up their drone capabilities, and we’re now regularly seeing attacks that use hundreds of drones on each side. 

You combine that with the precision targeting information, much less Western weaponry, and you can have a really dramatic change in the course of the war in literally a matter of days, and we may about be there.