Counting (Lithium) Chickens Before They Hatch

Photo showing trucks at a lithium mine

Some new advancements in AI and geology have revealed a massive lithium deposit in Arkansas’s Smackover Formation (great name by the way). While this is good news, we still have a lot of work to do before this lithium sees the light of day.

Traditional methods of lithium extraction aren’t going to work in Arkansas, so Exxon is pioneering a chemical extraction process, which is showing promise. Again, we’re early stages in what this will look like, but it has solid potential.

This deposit might not solve the demand EV’s are bringing about, but there is huge potential to improve grid storage. This would allow excess renewable energy to be stored, addressing rising energy demands in the US. Again, this is still early on, but energy storage could be transformed by 2030.

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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.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is not only disturbingly pleasant—I mean, it’s kind of surreal—but there are more good food options within a two-block radius than in the entire Denver metro, which kind of pisses me off anywho. I’m here near Market Square, and today we’re going to talk about the new…

Well, it’s not all that new, but the popularization of the lithium deposit that was found in Arkansas. Now, like I said, it’s not new. This is called the Smackover formation, which is a great name. I want to buy a drink for whoever named it. Anyway, it’s been producing bromide for the better part of a century, so the geology is reasonably well known.

What has happened is one of the breakthroughs with AI is being able to look at the geology from new angles, and correlate it with updates in understanding for mining and geology that have come in the decades since. And they think that there’s more than enough lithium there to supply global supplies for like a factor of nine or something. Ridiculous.

Now, I don’t want to overstate this, because just because the lithium is there doesn’t mean it can be harvested. For example, 90% of the oil in the world that we are aware of will never be able to produce. It’s too deep, it’s too technically challenging, the bits are too small—whatever it happens to be. But in the case of the Smackover, in specifically the Arkansas part of it, there’s already production in this zone, and it has been for decades.

Just not for lithium. Quick review of lithium production. There are two types: you’ve got rock formations and rock mining, which is what dominates in Australia. It’s a little bit more expensive than the other method, because you actually have to pull the ore out of the ground and grind it up and process it to extract the lithium from everything else.

But it is a relatively quick way of doing it, even if it is involved. It’s rock mining, so, you know, you’re going to have all the tailings, you’re going to have all the processing issues, and all the at-long costs. It’s energy-intensive—all that good stuff. Second, you have brine mining, which is what they have in Chile.

There, there’s a subsurface water source that is rich in dissolved lithium. You pull the liquid out, you pour it into an evaporation pond, and over the next 18 months, you, you know, basically wait for it to concentrate. So it’s cheaper than rock mining in Australia, but there’s a really long lag time, and you need a specific sort of surface.

Up on top, in order to do the extraction.

So the Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest parts of the world, and the mines are about 7,500 ft. So you have a lot of sun, you’ve got a desert, you’ve got low vapor pressure, and it still takes 18 months to concentrate the brine down to something that can actually use. In the case of all, in case of Arkansas, it is a brine formation.

The Smackover. But you’re talking about a state where the highest point in the entire state is like 2,500 ft, and where the mines would be, they’re significantly lower. And you don’t have the large, flat, dry areas. Arkansas is pretty humid, so doing traditional evaporation is just completely a no-go. And if that was the only technology in play, this wouldn’t work at all.

But it’s not the only technology in play. There is a relatively new method for lithium extraction from brine, which is basically a direct extraction that uses chemical catalysts and similar things to extract the lithium from the water. Now, the concentration in Arkansas is about 300 mg/L versus 400 mg/L in Chile.

So the Arkansas deposit isn’t as good in terms of quality as a Chilean one, but there’s a lot of infrastructure in place already, and Exxon is the primary company that is involved. And, you know, Exxon doesn’t pull things out of the ground unless it thinks it can make money. And so it has pioneered this direct extraction technology in a number of test wells already on site in Arkansas.

So the only thing that has really changed is that we’ve had this new AI model saying that there’s a lot, a lot, a lot, lot more than we originally thought. And in the next three years, Exxon expects to have first commercial volumes. Now, they’re not telling us what “commercial volumes” are, so we’re going to have to wait and see.

But, one of the things that has been a limiting factor on a lot of the green transition is batteries, and I have not made any secret of my general opposition to lithium use in transport, because it’s a horrible battery chemistry. It charges too slowly. It discharges too slowly. It heats up and swells. It’s just a bad idea to put on something that moves.

But if you were to make a lot of small- to medium-sized batteries, put them in series, and just put them in a building where the heat and the swelling could be maintained or even harvested, you could use it for grid storage very, very, very easily. So this isn’t going to revolutionize the world of EVs, but it might, if it works, revolutionize the world of electricity.

One of the problems we’re going to have in the United States over the next ten years is as the Chinese system vanishes from the world, we’re going to have to expand our industrial plant. That means we need at least 50% more electricity generation than we currently have. And until and unless we can build the infrastructure to link the entire country together so that anyone can generate power anywhere and send it anywhere else—which is a tall order.

The easier patch is to put a lot of batteries in a lot of places, so that during periods of high supply and low demand—for example, solar shining during the day—you capture the extra and then use it at night. Everyone’s asleep at night. You burn your natural gas at night, when normally you would cycle. Now you just pour that energy into a power, into a battery pack, and then you use it during the day.

You know, you could use this in any possible grid if we can produce enough lithium at a low enough cost. And I have to say, between the engineering, the technology, and the geology, this does look promising. Just keep in mind: first commercial production, 2027, which means first large-scale batteries, 2030. This isn’t going to solve everything overnight, but it’s a very promising step in the right direction.

My Favorite US President of All Time Is…

Many of you have asked who my favorite US President is, so I figured I would do a video covering that. And we don’t have to go too far back, just to number 41 – George H.W. Bush.

He had the right skills for the job (thanks to experience as a congressman, ambassador, CIA director, and VP) and he navigated a changing (and globalizing) world in a way that sustained American dominance, improved the human condition, and helped manage the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Since “Poppy” lost his re-election, we’ve seen a series of narcissistic presidents, leading the US down a more isolationist and protectionist path. The window to reshape the global order is closing for now, and it will be a few decades before the US and the wider world is ready to try it again.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click 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.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from D.C. That’s obviously the Washington Monument behind me, one of the handful of things not covered in scaffolding at the moment. Considering that the election is almost upon us, I decided to take a question from the Ask Peter forum on the Patreon page and answer: who is my favorite president and why?

And that’s a no-brainer. That’s George Herbert Walker Bush. If you consider he was president at the end of the Cold War and helped manage the decline of the Soviet Union without a shot being fired in our direction, isn’t that enough to make him a great president? But think about what it was he tried to get us to do.

He wanted us to have a conversation with ourselves about how we take the Cold War alliance, the globalized system, and play it forward for another generation of American preeminence, while also aiming to improve the human condition. And if you think about what he inherited, that was pretty bold, because the whole idea of globalization was that we needed a world full of allies to be on our side against the Soviet Union. To do that, we created the global structure and used our Navy to patrol the global ocean so anyone could trade with anyone else without even a military escort.

Basically, it would be like every single country won World War II all by themselves and could dictate the terms. Free commerce, and the U.S. allowed everyone to do that. Having those assets in play when the Soviet Union finally fell presented the ability to create a new human condition on a global basis, and he was the right person to do it. Not only had he just come from the White House—not just for two years as president, but eight years as vice president—he had served in Congress as an elected representative.

He’d been an ambassador to China, run the CIA, and was on a first-name basis with everyone in the world who mattered. He was the right person in the right place at the right time with the right Rolodex, asking the right question. So, of course, we voted against him, threw him out of office, and started down a parade of relatively or increasingly narcissistic leaders.

The six we’ve had since then include definitely four of the worst presidents we’ve ever had in American history. I’ll let you guys debate among yourselves who the two exceptions are. But it was a missed opportunity. And now, today, that opportunity has probably expired. The United States has not just simply turned sharply isolationist and protectionist on both sides of the political aisle, but the nature of the world has now changed to the point that doing any sort of broad reboot is not possible.

Thirty years on, we’re all 30 years older. Most countries have terminal demographics, and the moment we had to reshape everything has passed. So we’re going to have to wait another 20 or 30 years for all of this to shake out. Hopefully, at the end of that period, we will have another president similar to Herbert Walker Bush who is willing to ask us that question again.

And maybe this next time, we’ll choose to answer. 

Undocumented Immigrants’ Impact on US Labor and Economy

Photo of an immigrant in a strawberry field

As of late, the topic of illegal immigration is getting as much airtime as Brittney Spears did in the early 2000s. And I hate to burst your bubble, but all those undocumented immigrants are probably doing more good than harm.

Without the influx of ~2 million undocumented immigrants in 2023, labor shortages would have likely caused higher inflation. As the baby boomers retire and the US needs to re-industrialize, labor needs are skyrocketing; this will be putting a heavy strain on industries like healthcare, construction and agriculture, areas where these undocumented workers are heavily employed. Simply put, without these workers, the US economy would be hurting.

Policymakers have obstructed and neglected meaningful immigration reform since the 80s. However, if we could modernize this system (which would take some political creativity currently lacking in DC), we could realize the full benefits of these immigrants minus the constant political bickering.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click 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.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Austin, Texas. And today we’re going to talk about everyone’s favorite topic this election season: illegal migration. I’ve no doubt on record saying that if the United States hadn’t had the wave of illegal migration that it had in calendar year 2023—about 2 million people—we’d probably be dealing with inflation north of 8% by now.

So I figured that’s worth a bit of an explanation. In most labor markets, you’ve got a degree of liquidity where workers can move from one subsector to another based on the economic moves and remuneration of the day. But for that to work, you can’t be headed states. You see, here in the United States, the baby boomers are in the process of retiring.

Two-thirds of them have already gone. So we have a labor shortage. In addition, the United States is in the midst of a massive re-industrialization wave as we prepare for the end of the Chinese system. Basically, if we want manufactured products, we have to build it ourselves. So demand has never been higher, and supply has been curtailed. We no longer have that pool of labor that can shift from one thing to the other or be tapped and tracked in terms of building booms.

And so anyone who is removed from the system immediately generates a pulse that goes through the entire network, driving prices higher. So yes, there are 2 million people who crossed illegally last year. Most of them are in the workforce, most here in Texas. As for the folks that are residing here illegally, which, based on whose numbers you’re using, are somewhere between 7 and 14 million.

That’s another huge chunk of the labor force that actually outnumbers the number of folks the United States has who might theoretically be looking for jobs. Unemployment in the United States is below 4%; we’re at historic lows right now. So if you were to remove some of the people who are working, we’d feel it immediately. Now, not all jobs are equal.

These illegal migrants do tend to cluster in three general categories. The first one is health care, particularly when you’re talking about something that’s on the edge of a janitorial job, you know, moving people, clearing bedpans, that sort of thing. The second is in construction, especially industrial construction, because, remember, the United States needs to double the industrial plant.

That doesn’t happen without building a lot of stuff. And third, and finally, agriculture, particularly in fresh foods, whether it’s vegetables or tree fruit. These last two are jobs that Americans just don’t want to do, won’t do, or can’t do. They’re hot. They’re heavy, outdoorsy work—certainly not the sort of stuff that today’s youth, especially Gen Z, is really interested in.

And so that just leaves us with the illegal labor pool. If you were to remove that labor pool, we wouldn’t be able to harvest any of our fruits and vegetables. So say goodbye to most of the produce in grocery stores. We certainly wouldn’t be able to build new homes or new industrial plants, so say hello to dependence on China until China is gone—and then you just don’t have stuff.

And if you don’t want to clean your own bedpan when you go into the hospital or retire, well, then, by all means, be against migration. The question, of course, is whether we can amend our legal structure so that we actually have an updated immigration system to process these people in a way that we find a.

At the moment, we haven’t had meaningful immigration reform in this country since the 1980s, and folks on both sides of the political aisle have taken steps at multiple points to prevent that from happening. So if

you were to wave a magic wand to make this all work better, you’d find a way to induce the would-be illegal migrants to actually collaborate with the system.

And that’s a very different sort of legal structure and enforcement and would require a degree of policy creativity we just have not seen in the White House or in Congress for quite some time

Can a BRICS Currency Replace the US Dollar?

A photo of US one dollar bill

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the US dollar ain’t going nowhere. There’s simply no other currency with the volume or liquidity to fill the shoes of the dollar.

Everyone seems to be obsessed with a BRICS currency takeover, but even at the BRICS summit they shot that down. A euro replacement was possible at some point, but the financial crises and close sanctions coordination between the US and EU shot that option down as well.

Even the country who would love to see the US dollar fall more than anyone – Russia – can’t function without the US dollar. So, if anyone is telling you to get rid of your USD, you can politely tell them to kick rocks.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click 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.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Palm Springs, California, one of the less natural places on the planet. It’s only just happened to just. Hilarious. Okay. It’s no surprise that I am kind of a, I don’t know, bulls. The wrong term. That makes it sound like a financial play. I don’t think the U.S. dollar is going anywhere.

And I think the debt situation in the United States, while not my ideal, is not the thing that’s going to tear down the U.S. dollar at all. In fact, there is no currency out there in the world, that can replace the United States in terms of volume or liquidity, no matter what the country or theory happens to be.

And something that really drives that home is now happened within the BRICs alliance. BRICs Alliance, wrong word BRICs organization. It’s not even that BRICs association. There we go. Anyway, there are some folks who think that BRICs is going to ultimately displace the U.S. dollar system in the global trading system and usher in a new world where the United States doesn’t exist, or some other.

Not since. But let’s talk about what happened in the last two summits. So 1st November of 2023, the summit in Johannesburg. In their opening statements, the South African, Indian and Chinese delegations all said they have no interest in the US dollar being supplanted. They have no interest in a BRICs currency. And will everyone please stop asking them? The concept that the US dollar is going away is largely one that is constrained to the the fringes of the US financial world with people looking for some new bizarre investment play.

It really hasn’t gone beyond that. Certainly countries haven’t signed on to alternatives, largely because they really aren’t any. The biggest one would have been the European euro. But when they started using insured banks deposits to pay for bailouts 15 years ago, everyone got out of the euro. So now it’s a regional currency. And in the aftermath of the Ukraine war, when the Japanese, the Europeans and the Americans started to basically coordinate all sanctions, European policy and Japanese policy on most big currency issues became a subset of whatever the US Federal Reserve and Treasury Department were doing, so that even that small window has passed.

But the really hilarious thing happened in Russia this past week, at the most recent BRICs summit that the Russians were hosting. And remember that the Russians are the most anti-American country in the world. And if there ever was going to be somebody who would actually be willing to pay through the nose to create something that bypasses the dollar, even if it doesn’t do them any financial good, it would be the Russians.

So they’re going to have everybody coming to Kazan in central Russia for this summit to talk about all the ways that the Russians want to move away from anything that the United States touches. But on the topic of currency and the prep materials that were sent out to all the delegates were reminders that Russia is under sanctions. So don’t bring your visa or Mastercard.

They won’t work. There may be a handful, like single digit number of places in town that will use a Chinese charge card, but we really don’t like that system either. So you really shouldn’t count on that. You’re gonna have to use cash. However, it’s really hard to get rubles outside of Russia these days. Again, sanctions. So what you need to do is come with hard currency.

And the only two hard currencies that Russian banks will now accept are the U.S. dollar and the euro, because we desperately need their own country in order to maintain any sort relations with absolutely anyone. So bring your euros, bring your dollars, and when you can change them for rubles when you get here. So you can actually spend money, but you won’t be able to change them because we need the dollars.

Oh.

Oh, good. The fact that people still think that the dollar’s going away. I just, Anyway, there may have been more to that, but honestly, I’m just laughing too much inside. We’re just going to call that a day.

US Regions of the Future: Texas & North Carolina

We’re busting out the trusty ole crystal ball today, and looking at the two US regions most poised to succeed in the coming decades. I’m guessing it has something to do with the BBQ they’re eating, so yes, we’re talking about Texas and North Carolina.

The Texas Triangle is the region to watch in Texas; this is made up of DFW, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. This places have already seen huge growth in the past 30 years – partially thanks to integration with Mexico – and that growth is set to continue. With Houston covering energy, Austin managing tech, San Antonio on top of manufacturing, and DFW financing everything (and don’t forget no income tax), all the bases are covered. They just have to worry about the high temps and urban sprawl.

North Carolina is one that you don’t see in the headlines often, but don’t let this sleeper state fool you. Given the ample space for new industrial plants and its already developed corridor of Charlotte-Greensboro, North Carolina has all the bones to be a production haven. They’ll have to figure out the money side of things, but I’m sure New York and Boston will have no problem tossing them a few bucks to help meet their production needs.

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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.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Trinity River Greenbelt in the heart of Dallas, Texas. Today we’re gonna do a little bit of a compare and contrast of the two parts of the United States that economically, I think are going to do the best. The first one, of course, is Texas, specifically an area called the Texas Triangle, which includes the four great Texas cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin.

Now, this is a part of the country that has done exceedingly well for the last 30 years. It has taken advantage of the fusion with Mexico to basically generate like one third of the total economic growth the U.S. has experienced. Mostly, that’s just the integration of Texas and northern Mexico. Houston is, of course, the energy town and the Permian Basin and the Eagle further right here.

So they will never have, a problem with energy supply. Austin is a tech center, which is where Silicon Valley sends all their new designs. And Austin figures out how to make it work. Those, once they make it work, it they go to San Antonio and Dallas for the mass manufacture in Dallas is in addition to being a manufacturing center, it’s also arguably the second or third biggest financial center in the United States.

It’s also in terms of spatial land and population growth and the fastest growing city in the United States. These are all trends that are likely to continue for at least the next 30 years. And as the United States needs to restore jobs and gobs and gobs of manufacturing, this is definitely the region that will benefit from these changes the most in absolute terms, with it basically being a Duke out between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, I’ve seen who’s the top city and who’s number two and number two still a pretty good position.

The only downside of it, as you may have guessed, is that, you know, this is not a walk friendly city. Dallas, all of the Texas cities have expanded hugely over the last 30 years, and they’re having all the growing pains that come from this. And just getting to this green belt was a bit of a chore. Also, it is October 2nd.

As I recording this, it’s already 85 degrees at nine in the morning. We’re hit 95 today. So these in many ways are becoming indoor cities, especially Houston, where for large portions of the year you just don’t want to be outside. So there’s definitely a quality of living issue. But they make up for it by having no income tax.

So you know you got to choose, the other state, which I had hoped to record, the other half of this video from is North Carolina. Unfortunately, it was raining the entire time I was there because of Hurricane Helene. And when we finally got a break and I went outside, I got stung by a bee before I got more than a 10th of a mile from my hotel.

So I took the Q and A recording. The North Carolina function from here. North Carolina is not a state that a lot of people think of when they think of industry. I mean, you know, it’s got more than 10 million people. It’s got a reasonable chunk of population. But the coast of North Carolina isn’t that great for ports.

And so it’s never been thought of as kind of an inroad X road ingress egress sort of trade hub. Also, you’ve got the much more dynamic economies and larger economies further to the north of the south. Atlanta obviously is a bigger city than anything that the North Carolinians have. And if you go north, you don’t just hit, the greater DC area, you hit Megalopolis.

So we always kind of forget about North Carolina in the middle, but in the world we’re moving into, the United States needs to double the size of the industrial plate. We are seeing that in Texas on a very daily basis. But in the case of North Carolina, the advantage is that the northeast can’t do it. Like I said, 100 million people, they don’t have much brown space.

They don’t really have green space at all. And they’re still going to need product. So they are going to be looking around for places to invest in physical plants in order to build the stuff that they need. The first stop is Virginia, and I’m not suggesting Virginia is going to punch well above her weight, but Northern Virginia is incorporated into the DC sprawl.

There’s no room there for a lot of industry. Richmond is great. Love Richmond, but it’s on its own. And until the Jones Act is repealed, the Chesapeake is a body of water that should be an industrial powerhouse, but isn’t because we’ve made it impossible for shipping among the Chesapeake communities. And so it’s basically a near rural region, which means your next chunk of population centers, if you go west, you hit, Pennsylvania.

And, you know, you’re probably going to see some build out there of the former, Rust Belt. But really it comes down to North Carolina and the, options kind of come in three phases. The first phase is a corridor that already exists, and that’s the kind of northeast or southwest corridor between Charlotte at the south end and the triad cities of Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem at the north.

This is an area that is very well developed, has a lot of infrastructure that’s in very good shape and basically there’s endless room for industrial parks up and down the entire corridor. In the second phase, you can link this first quarter up with another quarter that’s further east. The Fayetteville, Raleigh, Durham corridor. And basically you get this parallelogram that looks a lot to me in shape and structure, like the Texas triangle.

And the space in between is pretty much easy to develop. And even if that’s not enough and that’s a lot a little bit further east, you’ve got some areas that are kind of cut through with rivers and the North Carolina. So try not to think about that because it’s the poorer part of the state. But the potential industrial space there, the worst of it is better than the best in the northeast.

The only problem that the North Carolina is going to have with this is the capital, build out the industrial plant, but that’s where New York and Boston and DC and Connecticut and the rest of them come in because their choice is to not have product or to help the North Carolinians help there. So in absolute terms, Texas definitely far and away the winner here in relative terms look to North Carolina.

America After the Election: Foreign Policy & Does Turkey Have the Power to Control Israel’s Future?

A 2020 electoral college map

America After the Election: Foreign Policy

Listen, I debated even entertaining an election video for today, but since this question was so good, I just had to record one.

The question is: what aspects of American foreign policy are going to stick with us regardless of who wins the presidential election? The answer is not as eloquent.

I’m sure that not one of you will like what I had to say and that’s fineeeee, because as long as I pissed off everyone, I should be in the clear…and I coincidentally planned an international trip, so enjoy! Muahahahah!

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

 

Does Turkey Have the Power to Control Israel’s Future?

Israel has had a lot of eyes on it lately and many are starting to wonder what the future looks like for this small and arid country. Let’s break this down through the lens of deglobalization.

With US involvement and globalization set to decline, Israel could be losing a very valuable partner. Remember that the US has supported Israel with critical resources like food and energy, as well as on the security and military fronts. That leaves some pretty big shoes to fill.

I don’t want to discredit Israel entirely because they have established themselves as a technological power, but that can only take them so far. The main shortcomings being energy, food, and protection. Thankfully there are some viable options out there.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have already begun working together and I would expect that to continue. Turkey, who will take some convincing to enter into a partnership, would be a powerful addition to the team (Turkey is poised to be the regional leader moving forward, thanks to its military and economic power). And then we’ll throw in Egypt to round out the roster.

I don’t want to put too much stress on this, but if Israel can’t figure out its relationship with Turkey…the Israeli future could look bleak.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click 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.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript #1

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, well we are two-thirds of the way through our first ten inches of snow for the season. Ooh. Happy election day to everyone. I had considered just letting this pass and just dealing with the crap that’s going to inevitably happen after. But I got a really good question from one of the Patreon crowd members.

So I figured I would take a shot at it, before I leave the country for a couple days. So, the question is this: what aspects of American foreign policy are going to stick with us regardless of who wins the presidential election? Great question. I do not have a great answer. In the world until roughly…

Oh, let’s call it 2012. We had something in the United States, when it came to foreign policy and strategic policy, called the bipartisan consensus. And the idea was that the Soviet Union was bad. Global communism was not a great idea. And the way for the United States to secure its security, as well as its economic well-being, was to build an alliance network that would span the world and pursue a free-trade world,

a globalized world with everyone so that most countries of consequence would have a vested interest in benefiting from participating in the American security agreements rather than going and doing something else. And that gave us NATO and the Japanese and the Korean, the Taiwanese alliances, and all of that, and built the nonaligned world into an economic powerhouse that wasn’t necessarily aligned with the United States, but really wasn’t aligned with anyone else either.

Broadly worked. But then in 2012, we had eight years of a visceral disinterest in governing, by Barack Obama. And then we got Donald Trump and Joe Biden, who were two of the most economically populist presidents we’ve ever had. And over that 16-year period, the bipartisan consensus has withered away. And the party that was responsible for basically writing most of the real policies, the Republican Party, has now

found itself in a different place with the national security conservatives and the business conservatives not really even part of the party architecture any longer.

And there are some factions of the Republican Party that are finding themselves very strangely aligned on some issues with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. So, to say that security policy is no longer up for grabs in the United States is not paying attention to what’s really going on. What that means is the United States is in a period of flux, not just politically, internally, but internationally.

Now, this is the topic of a lot of my workings,

Starting with The Absent Superpower and The Accidental Superpower ten years ago. But what we’re seeing in the United States is also churning other things, which means that very few of the things that we consider to be normal national security and economic precepts are likely to survive because the institutions of the parties that formed them are themselves up for grabs.

And we’re seeing the leadership of both the Democratic and the Republican Party taking the institutions into a nonfunctional era. They will reform, and we will get to a situation where we can have a meaningful conversation about foreign policy again, but it’s probably not going to be for a few more years. So we’re stuck with what we have.

So let’s start with the Democrats and Kamala Harris. How can I say this without sounding like a complete prick? She’s an empty suit. Kamala Harris’s only job experience before she became vice president was being a prosecutor, which is, you know, better than the last three presidents, but it’s still not a lot. It’s a relatively minor view of anything.

And so when you look at anything she’s going to say about anything, she’s never actually implemented anything. And so you have to take everything with a big block of salt. In her first year as vice president, she was at Joe Biden’s side in every press conference, every summit, every meeting, and it got to the point that Biden’s staff decided that, no, we don’t want her around.

So they gave her a task that they knew she would fail at and gave her no power to carry it out. And that was going down to solve the border. And so, lo and behold, it was a failure. And then they were able to shovel her off to the side for the next two and a half years until it turns out she’s the presidential nominee.

So if you are voting for Kamala Harris, do not fool yourself. You are voting for an unknown, somebody with very limited experience, and who will come into the White House without a circle of people around her who are competent. They’re going to be people she’s picked up, people who are not loyal to her personally, most likely.

And so it really is a crapshoot. And then, of course, we’ve got the Republican side. And I’m going to put aside for the moment most of my feelings on Donald Trump on strategic issues. I would just ask you to look at really any of his interviews or rallies

in the last three weeks, especially the one that was in Michigan two days ago.

The degradation that I saw during the debate with Biden was in full swing, and this guy is just not all there anymore. So even if he does become president, he probably won’t be for very long. Keep in mind that he is older now than Joe Biden was when Joe Biden became president. And the mental fortitude required for the job is immense.

And Trump just doesn’t have it. So don’t kid yourself. If you’re voting for Trump, you’re actually voting for JD Vance. And JD Vance is even more of an empty suit than Kamala Harris. He’s also a bit of a chameleon, which I don’t know if it’s a plus or minus. He wrote a somewhat famous book,

Hillbilly Elegy, a few years ago, and since then, he’s partially repudiated what he said.

And then he said that Donald Trump was a horrible person, should never be president, and was a danger to democracy. And he’s obviously repudiated that. This is a guy who will say anything to get closer to power. And if Trump wins, he will be the next president. So we’ve got two candidates here who both seem to be fairly economically populist, both of which have no experience in the real world,

and no experience in government—very limited, anyway. And that’s what’s on the docket. So any sort of institutional loyalties are weak to none. Any sort of policy experience that might give us an idea of what they might prioritize is negligible. And so any sort of policies that might have consistency, from the last 20 years to the next four, it’s going to be a short list.

The issue with foreign policy in the United States is that most of it is a presidential prerogative, and it’s very rare that Congress has any say in any of it, at least in the formative stages. And so if we don’t know who, institutionally speaking, politically speaking, ethically speaking, the next president is going to be because there’s no track record,

we don’t know what they’re going to prioritize at all, and we don’t know how they would react to any hypothetical scenario because they’ve never had to do it before. The only policies that are an exception, then, are issues where the president has chosen to cede a degree of authority to Congress and lock something in with an act of Congress that limits the president’s room to maneuver. Those sorts of policies will probably stick because it would require an act of Congress to overthrow them.

In the case of the United States, that’s a very short list of things. And most are related to trade, of which by far the most important policy that falls into that bucket is NAFTA. Now

I’ve made no bones about my general dislike of Donald Trump on any number of issues, but what he did with NAFTA 2 renegotiation, I thought, was brilliant because it was the right thing at the right time with the right partner.

Mexico has become our number one trade partner. And if there is a future for the United States economically, outside of being locked into a very dangerous and unequal relationship with China, Mexico will be the core of whatever that happens to be. And so having the hard work done already, and having it be the isolationist right of the United States that did the negotiations, I thought was great.

So no matter who becomes president next, I think NAFTA is fine. And honestly, that is the single most important foreign policy priority the United States has. So at least when it comes to preparing for whatever is next in the world, as the Chinese become more belligerent and as they start to fall apart, as the Ukraine war crescendos and we face the Russian demographic dissolution as the European

fractures because the population there is making it very difficult for them to do anything else.

The most important single piece of our future was done by Donald Trump, and he deserves credit for that. And I don’t think that whoever his successor is—Harris or JD Vance—is going to have the political authority or interest in overturning that. So, you know, hurray. Now, with that said, I have now probably thoroughly pissed off everybody on both sides.

You should go vote. And you should know that by the time you’re seeing this video, I’m already out of the country, so have a good one.

Transcript #2

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the coast of South Carolina. Several of you have written in on our Patreon forum with questions about what the future of Israel will be, especially as the world de-globalizes. Well, a little background, and then we’ll go into it.

So, number one: Israel is not a big place. We’re talking about a country that’s roughly the size of New Jersey, in a large neighborhood that is pretty arid and not exactly full of friends. Yes, Israel has built a surprisingly dynamic society with an amazing level of technological acumen, but it didn’t do it alone. The question is whether it can sustain itself; it’s basically a de facto sponsorship of the United States from the beginning. And while, for example, its missile defenses are impressive, the real ones—the ones that intercept the ballistic missiles, the arrows—have never functioned without American participation in terms of targeting, tracking, and even, you know, firing.

So, by far the most capable state of the region, but the PA isn’t exactly high. Here’s a country that imports the vast majority—over 80%—of its energy. And despite all the talk, a kibbutz is something like three-quarters of its food as well. So it’s in kind of a pickle. It requires foreign sponsorship for security and it requires access to economies outside of the region for its energy and its food. You remove the United States as the security guarantor, or you remove globalization, and this should, in theory, be one of those countries that, without a radical change of affairs, is simply going to dry up and blow away.

Now, I don’t think that is Israel’s future because a few things are going to change, some of which already have. One of the things that so frustrates the United States about Israel is it acts on its own. It has agency. When you are so much more technically capable and have so much more reach than your neighbors, you have some options. And the Israelis often exercise that. They often engage in military and paramilitary operations that are directly opposed to U.S. interests. And because of that, the Israelis have this view that no ally is worth forever. If push comes to shove, you do what you feel you need to do. And if it happens to piss off the person who ensures you get fed and the lights come on and the missiles get shot down, well, that’s so be it.

They know that at some point down the road they’re going to have to do things differently. And while they probably can’t do it on their own, that doesn’t mean that they can’t find a new friend. So, the question is, who are the candidates?

Well, in terms of energy, I would argue that they’ve already found that one. Starting over 15 years ago, the Israelis basically built a de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia would provide them with some intel on Iran and some energy. And in exchange, the Israelis would provide the Saudis with backdoor access to American weapons systems that the Americans were willing to sell to Saudi Arabia, along with the training that was necessary so they could use them. In addition, anything that involves Iran, the two of them will operate pretty closely.

Now, this doesn’t mean they get along on everything. Obviously, when it comes to the Palestinians, there are still some fine details to work out. But the two of them get on pretty well behind the scenes and publicly spout a lot. But behind the scenes, they’re actually getting along great; they’re reasonable friends. Agriculture is easier. There are a lot more countries in the region that provide food surpluses, most notably in Europe. So it’s not like the Israelis need access to the globalized system to keep the food flowing.

But when it comes to security, that basically tells you where they’re going to get their food. Every country in the Middle East is in the process of wondering when the United States will pull back and, if so, who they should go to. And none of the options are particularly good if you’re an Arab. If you consider that the French and the Brits and the Turks have all had colonial empires in the region, no one really wants to go back to that day. But if you’re Israeli, you’ve got some options because the Israelis were never really a traditional colony; it was formed by the Zionist movement in the aftermath of World War II.

Partnering up with France, or Britain, or in my opinion, Turkey, is something that can be done with a minimum of cultural pain. Of the three, the most likely candidate will be Turkey—not because it’s the closest cultural cousin; it’s the opposite. But if Turkey is not a friend, then Turkey will most likely be an enemy. And having an alliance with someone against your local foe puts you really at the mercy of your ally. But if the Israelis can find a way to bury the hatchet with the Turks, then you take the largest economy and military in the area, with the most projection-based economy and military in the region, and you get a very powerful pairing.

That’s going to be pretty easy to justify joining. So I think the future of this region is likely to be Turkish-led, to a degree Israeli-managed, Saudi-fueled. And those three will have no problem bringing in Egypt as a big bulwark partner in North Africa. That quad is likely to be the power center for this region in a post-American system. And they have everything that all of them need—energy, security, naval access, food, and a really good network of intelligence systems.

I know a lot of you are going to say, “Wait a minute, doesn’t the Turkish government hate Israel right now?” Yes. I didn’t suggest any of this was going to be easy. The issue is that the Turkish government can protect Israel from, say, France or Britain, but France or Britain can’t really protect Israel from Turkey. So there’s really not a lot of strategic choice here. You know, if you’re Saudi Arabia, the idea of reaching out to a distant power like Japan or China makes a degree of sense. But for Israel, the potential foe is near and present. So if Israel cannot find a successful way to get along with Turkey, then Israel will vanish.

This is a region that is actually pretty easy for the Turks to get at. They’re not too far away. They only have to punch through Lebanon, and Lebanon is not really going to fight back. Not to mention you’re going to talk about a really meaningful blockade that would starve Israel of food and energy as well. Far better to find a way to get in bed with the Turks than the other way around.

So again, never said this would be easy. Never said there wasn’t a lot of work to do.

Israel Attacks Iran, Again – Part 1 & 2

An Israeli F-35I "Adir", the model of aircraft reported to have taken part in the strikes.

Part 1

Recently, Iran attacked Israel, again. And so last night Israel attacked Iran, again. Believe it or not, this is normal AND good news! At least until the Russians come to the party.

Part 2

Now that we’ve had a bit more time to see what happened in Israel’s latest attack on Iran, let’s dive a bit deeper. Israel struck military facilities like missile storage and production sites, but avoided nuclear and oil infrastructure.

This damage will set Iran’s missile capabilities back for a while, but these defenses were lackluster to begin with. A more significant takeaway from this attack was the absence of any meaningful resistance for the Israeli aircraft, which pokes some serious holes in the Russian-made S-300s and similar Chinese models.

Israel’s attack not only diminishes Iran’s military power, but also gave the world some insight as to shifting regional power dynamics.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Austin, Texas. It is the 27th of October, and we’re going to do a follow-on to yesterday’s video about the Israeli retaliatory strike on Iran. Now that we know a little bit more about what was hit, the Israelis were able to target military facilities. They didn’t go after the nuclear program and they did not go after oil facilities.

Instead, their primary targets were facilities that stored missiles and were a critical component in the construction of the missiles that the Iranians like to use. Basically, there’s two types of fuel that you can put in a ballistic missile. The first is liquid fuel. This is cheaper and technically easier, but it’s very dangerous because you can’t store the rocket fuel in the rocket.

If you’re not going to launch in the next couple of days, you generally leave them empty. So, it’s easy to know when the bad guys are going to launch a bunch of missiles because satellite images can show the trucks pumping in the somewhat toxic, very explosive, very dangerous fuel.

Now, the Iranians have moved on from liquid fuel to solid fuel, which is much more stable. You can store the fuel in the rocket indefinitely, but it’s more technically involved, and the Iranians don’t know how to do it themselves. They bought the facilities to make this fuel from China, and now those are mostly smoking holes in the ground after the Israeli raid.

Until these facilities are rebuilt, and given Iran is now under much stricter sanctions than when it acquired these originally, the Iranians will have a hard time running their missile fleets as they have been, which is clearly what the Israelis were aiming for. They may have one or two operational fuel fabrication facilities left, but certainly not at a scale that poses a real threat to Israel.

So, you know, strike one, Iran. The second point to keep in mind is that wherever Israeli fighter bombers went—whether over Iraq, Lebanon, or Iran itself—they took out all the air defenses along the way. Most of the air defenses the Iranians use are called S-300s, which are the second from top-of-the-line system that the Russians produce and export.

The top model is the S-400. The Iranians knew this strike was coming, had plenty of notice, and still couldn’t shoot down a single Israeli jet. Between this raid and the war in Ukraine, where many of these S-300s are in use, we’ve been getting a bit of an awakening for people who have relied on Russian equipment all these years—it simply couldn’t do the job.

All of these air defenses are now smoking holes in the ground. On a larger stage, this has made the Israelis quite confident that whenever they feel the need to establish air superiority, they don’t even need jets—they just need to take out the air defenses since no one in the region has competitive air power.

Looking at the broader strategic picture, the Russians do have some S-400s, but not enough to provide full coverage, and they’ve already lost several in the Ukraine war. Yes, the S-400 is the most advanced air defense system the Russians have, but it’s not that much more advanced than the S-300. More importantly, the Chinese have their local air defenses, the HQ-9 and HQ-22, which are essentially knockoffs of the S-300 floor model, though upgraded in some ways with Chinese technology. We’ve never seen them in actual combat, but now we know the Israelis, who don’t even have a first-rate air force, were able to take out every S-300 they encountered. This suggests that the U.S., with its superior air force, would likely have no trouble operating in a similar environment if push came to shove with China.

Surely this isn’t what the Iranians planned when they conducted their raid on the 1st of October, but they’ve given strategic thinkers a lot to chew on, indicating that air defenses on the other side might not be nearly as interesting or capable as we’ve long assumed. So, you know, as

**Photo of an Israeli F-35I “Adir”, the model of aircraft reported to have taken part in the strikes by Wikimedia Commons.

Climate Change Will Be Different for Everyone

Let’s talk climate change. With conservative estimates, we’re looking at a few degrees of warming by the end of the century, but if we look at this in the light of global trends, it could be even worse.

This will manifest in more heat and humidity, especially in already hot and humid regions – think Singapore, Houston and parts of the Middle East. This will drive up mortality rates and decrease functionality, which will have an outsized impact on the poorer areas.

Food production is a big concern of mine. As temps warm, wind and moisture patterns will be altered. While this will benefit some areas (increasing water availability and potential for multiple harvests), many regions will lose their agriculture industry or face increased challenges in maintaining production. The main crop to watch is wheat, since it’s currently grown in marginal areas that will be most impacted by climate shifts.

Between climate change, depopulation, and deglobalization, we’re going to have plenty to talk about in the coming decades…

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a colorful Colorado. Today we’re taking an entry from the Ask Peter forum, specifically what I think the world will look like with a few degrees of warming. Since the industrial period began, we’re up 1.2°C, and assuming nothing changes, we are on track to be probably 3 to 4°C warmer by the end of the century.

And I think that’s overly optimistic because if we really are getting ready for a globalization period in human history, then the lower carbon fuels, oil, and gas are the ones that are internationally traded, and those are the ones that will vanish. And the high complexity fuel systems that require a dozen or more countries in order to make them function, say, solar, are not going to be available in large quantities.

So that will leave most countries with significant economic degradation. And if they still want electricity and heat, they’re going to have to use coal and/or wood. That’s a problem. So I would estimate we’re going to skid right past six degrees by the end of the century, and that’s six degrees centigrade, not Fahrenheit. So it’s a pretty significant change.

The downside with making specific forecasts is that, n equals one, as they like to say, we don’t have records in data to be able to provide us with very specific recommendations. What I’m about to say is probably should be considered much more broadly than I’m even going to say it, but there are a couple of patterns we can look at.

But because we do have over a century of hard data indicating that we are moving in this direction and what some of the early impacts can be. So number one, heat and humidity. As a rule, when the air gets warmer, it can hold more water. That’s a problem for hurricanes. But it also means that places that are already humid are likely to get more humid.

And think of it this way: if you live in a place that is already warm and humid for most of the year—I’m thinking here, Singapore, or Manila, or Houston—you know it’s going to get warmer, you know it’s going to get more humid. And when you pass a certain point, roughly, you know, 90°F, the body has a hard time cooling down.

And when you pass 100°F, it just doesn’t happen. And a lot of these places are going to be edging into a zone where they’re looking at hitting that 90-degree temperature in the night for large portions of the year. And so the implications for human health are pretty damning there. And functionality will be a real problem. Mortality rates will certainly spike.

And so you have to look at the economic capability of these cities and whether or not they can make this adjustment. I mean, some of them, Houston, Singapore, pretty much all of the Arab cities of the Persian Gulf, did this years ago. And you basically go from your air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned garage to an air-conditioned parking garage to an air-conditioned office block.

And if you happen to be one of those poor saps investor works outside, that’s too bad. But, like the Arabs in the Gulf has certainly shown that you can force people to work in 110-degree temperatures for short periods of time. You can still get stuff built. It’s not the best way to live. And you do have mortality rates that are a lot higher.

The Arabs get around this by using guest labor, which is a step off of slave, and then when they get too old to handle it, like, you know, 32, they send them home. But there are models that work—just the bulk of your population basically lives in an aquarium. Then you’ve got the cities that, due to economic vibrancy or strength or soon-to-be vibrancy, are likely to be able to make this transition.

They either on the edge of having enough money to make everybody live indoors, or they’re going to have it soon. I’m thinking there about Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Or, Istanbul in Turkey, or Bangkok in Thailand, or maybe, just maybe, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. And then you’ve got those cities that, it doesn’t look great.

They’re hot, they’re humid. And having the organizational capability and especially economic resources in order to make the switch, less problematic. And this is going to be most of the cities, especially in northern India. This is going to be Pakistan. I’m worried about the cities of northern Brazil in this regard. There are some cities in Iran that don’t look particularly promising.

A lot of North Africa falls into a similar category. These are just places where the economic wherewithal or the strength of the state is simply not sufficient in order to rewire all the infrastructure for a different sort of life. The second big category is going to be food production. There’s a lot about climate change and the specific effects that we’re still in the very early phases of learning.

So I don’t want to blow this out of proportion. But one of the things we do know for certain is that the poles are warming faster than the equator. And when you have big temperature differentials, you get winds, in this case, winds going from roughly the equator in the direction of the poles. Now that changes, most importantly, moisture patterns.

So if there is a large body of tropical or similar tropical water between you and the equator, when the wind goes over that zone, it’s going to pick up more moisture. Remember the water? The year is warmer, too, and you’re going to get storms going from the equator towards the pole, transferring moisture. Now this is good or bad based on where you are.

So, for example, if you are in the United States, especially in the Midwest, you’re looking at more moisture coming in from the Gulf, and warmer moisture at that. So you now have two streams of moisture. You have the jet stream that goes west to east across the continent, that brings moisture. And now you’ve got this Gulf current that’s always been there but is going to be much more powerful.

You live on the coast. That means hurricanes, which is not great. But if you’re in, say, Illinois, it means you’re actually getting more and more water. And water management is the issue. Well, as we’ve seen with plants, plants are a lot like people. As long as you can get a lot of water, then you don’t have to worry so much about the heat.

So we’re starting to see in parts of the Midwest—not even the southern Midwest, most notably Illinois—where we’re starting to see the very early stages of double cropping. So this is one of those where climate change could actually have a very positive impact on global agriculture. Other places that do have this tropical feature aren’t necessarily as well positioned to take advantage of it.

So like Mexico has this, China has this, but these are very rugged areas. And if you just dump more water in a rugged area, you get landslides, mudslides, and flooding. So not exactly great for agriculture. Other places are looking to probably get dried out by this factor because if you don’t have a tropical body of water below you, maybe you’ve got a desert.

And that describes the entirety of the Russian wheat belt, including Kazakhstan. So you’re looking at that area becoming desiccated. Northern Europe, while not exactly going to be falling out of its breadbasket status, has been seen. The weather patterns move steadily offshore for the last half-century as a result of this phenomenon. They do have the Mediterranean below them, but it’s not warm enough.

It’s not large enough, and so these winds are simply pushing normal moisture patterns out to sea or into Scandinavia. Australia could be a bit of a problem because the part of Australia that actually grows the food is on the southwest and the south, and while they do have this moisture effect that is kind of hitting the north part of the country, that’s not where the agriculture is.

So similar effect to what’s happening to Europe, just on the opposite side of the planet. So it’s pushing what weather used to hit the Murray-Darling basin or the Perth area in Western Australia and pushing it south towards and could occur the crop that is going to be most impacted by this is by far is wheat.

Wheat is wheat. And so, it used to be the only thing that most places grew. But in the globalized era, everyone started growing what they could grow best in their zone. And wheat gave way to corn and soy and marijuana and avocados and alfalfa and all the rest. And so wheat gets pushed to the margins, the places where it’s the warmest, where it’s the driest, or it’s the coldest, whatever it happens to be, because it’ll grow anywhere.

Well, if you change the environment of the planet, the places that are going to be pushed into non-production are going to be the ones at the margin. And wheat is the crop in most places where they’re going to see the most pressure. In North America, that’ll be in the Great Plains. In Argentina, that’ll be the southern pampas. In the Eurasian space,

It’s definitely the entirety of the Russian wheat belt. And in Australia, it’s probably going to be Western Australia. So you take all of this together, and we’re looking at parts of the world that are more equatorial, more tropical, becoming less habitable, less dynamic. And you’re going to have to spend most of their money on adapting their population-supporting infrastructure simply to be able to be inhabitable.

And if you’re looking for agriculture, we’re looking at the number one calorie source for the world, being in much smaller supply that will obviously play through in the geopolitics. But until we actually see governments start to crack, it’s really hard to say how. Remember, at the same time this is all going on. We’ve got the globalization shattering merchandise trade and energy trade, and we also have depopulation shattering the ability of countries to have a tax base and a workforce.

So there’s going to be a lot of variables going on at once.

Russians, Russians Everywhere

The Russian Embassy in Warsaw, Poland

Russian “diplomats” are being expelled from Poland due to sabotage attempts. Sabotage has long been a trick up the Russians’ sleeve, as we’ve seen in similar incidents across Europe targeting infrastructure and humanitarian shipments related to Ukraine.

The Five Eyes got rid of their Russian “diplomats” when the Ukraine war started, and that list of intelligence agents was shared with lots of other countries. Sooo, there’s been some widespread diplomatic purges of these Russians.

The Russians have been redeploying these agents worldwide, but predominantly focusing on Africa and Mexico; that’s where they see their sabotage and espionage efforts working the best.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a chilly Colorado morning. Today we’re going to talk about something that’s just happened. It’s October 23rd, and the Polish government has basically kicked everybody out of the Russian consulate in Poznan, declaring them all persona non grata due to attempted sabotage throughout the country, most notably in Lwow, I believe.

This is not new. We’ve seen dozens of sabotage efforts across Europe, angering a lot of people. They’ve targeted rail systems in Sweden and the Czech Republic, been accused of arson in the United Kingdom and Germany, and have interfered with humanitarian and military shipments to Ukraine, particularly going after food and medical supplies. It’s a frustrating situation but not entirely unexpected.

When the Ukraine war started, there was a wave of diplomatic expulsions. The “Five Eyes” — the American-led intelligence network that includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — and countries with robust intelligence systems, like France, Sweden, and the Dutch, began tracking Russian intelligence assets. With the onset of open conflict, countries with decent intel systems purged all KGB and GRU officers from embassies and shared lists of known agents with other nations.

At the time, about one-third of diplomats in Germany were reportedly KGB officers. Germany, however, was not very adept at intelligence, and given the political climate, many Germans believed the Russians were not a problem until the Ukraine war began. So, these Russian agents were expelled not only from NATO countries but also from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Consequently, Russia redeployed these agents elsewhere, and countries that received the lists were now aware of their status as intelligence assets.

Russia then shifted its sabotage activities globally, focusing heavily on Africa. This wave of Russian activity is partially why we’ve seen so many coups in Africa recently. There are three benefits Russia gains from these operations: changing the country’s strategic alignment and expelling Western assistance, destabilizing countries to create refugee flows that put pressure on Europe, and, crucially, seizing control of valuable assets like gold, given that Russia has been excluded from most global financial institutions. Russian groups like Wagner now operate gold mines across the Sahel, bringing gold back to Russia, refining it, and transporting it to pay for imports, often to countries like China.

Another specific hotspot is Mexico. The Mexican government sometimes resists U.S. security recommendations, making Mexico City one of the few embassies with a significant number of Russian agents. For those familiar with Cold War spycraft, this isn’t surprising; Mexico City was one of the top KGB outposts during the Cold War. The logic was that causing instability there could indirectly affect the United States. Although we haven’t seen overt sabotage in Mexico like in other regions, Russia is continuing its espionage activities.

SMRs Are Giving Nuclear Power a Facelift

Before we dive into today’s video, if you think back to August of last year…I sent out a video covering a few of these technologies and the limits of innovation. Here’s a link if you want a refresher:

Nuclear power has a bad reputation, and I get it…Chernobyl, nuclear waste, and outdated infrastructure. Buttt, it’s a reliable, carbon-free energy source that might be getting a much needed facelift soon-ish.

Companies like Google and Amazon are realizing their energy needs are growing, so they are investing in small modular reactors (SMRs) to help meet demands. There’s plenty of work to be done before these SMRs are operational, but funding from these tech powerhouses is critical for R&D.

While the small modular reactors won’t solve all of the nuclear issues, they are step in the right direction to changing the public’s opinion about nuclear power. And if this all works out, SMRs could even help solve the energy crisis the US is heading towards.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the Burbank airport just outside of Hollywood.

Today, we’re going to take up the second of our tech modification series, if that’s the right word, specifically talking about nuclear power.

Now, nuclear power is something I’m generally in favor of because it is carbon-free, reliable, and the supply chain is typically within the United States. These are all good things. But there’s also a mechanical issue: public support for it is low. The Russians have been agitating; they can’t stand the idea of nuclear power on a global basis, as it competes with their hydrocarbon exports, even though they use nuclear power themselves quite a bit. Then there’s always the waste disposition issue, which the United States hasn’t really solved. When you’re done using nuclear fuel, you’re left with nuclear waste that you either have to process—requiring a plutonium supply chain in the civilian sector, which is risky from a proliferation perspective—or store somewhere, which results in accumulating waste. The United States has yet to build a large-scale repository to handle all this material, so it tends to be stored on-site. This means that the dozens of nuclear facilities around the country have cooling ponds containing tons of fissile waste material. Other countries have solved these problems, but the U.S. requires a regulatory overhaul, likely several acts of Congress, and would need years to build out the manufacturing system to produce more than one plant, considering we may need dozens.

What has changed, making me more optimistic about the sector, is that big tech is now entering the nuclear business. Big tech companies are building more data centers, and demand for electricity is skyrocketing, especially in locations like Virginia, where about half of the country’s data centers are located. Companies like Microsoft are choosing data centers near nuclear power facilities. Google and Amazon are sponsoring startups to build something called small modular reactors (SMRs), which are portable, can be placed on trucks, and potentially connected to existing grid infrastructure, like old coal plants, or directly power data centers.

There are still regulatory hurdles, and I don’t mean to suggest this will happen overnight, but the fact that Amazon and Google are willing to commit financially to these future reactors is a major boost for companies working on SMR research and prototyping. While we don’t yet have a prototype of a small modular reactor, this kind of investment could push the research forward. I don’t want to over-promise, but this might be the beginning of a more resilient, localized nuclear power infrastructure.

We also have aging nuclear plants to consider. With one exception, all operating nuclear power plants in the country are over 50 years old and have had their lives extended due to their significance to the grid. However, we’re nearing the technical limits of how long these plants can operate, and they will need to be replaced as the United States’ industrial capacity expands, increasing demand for electricity.

Incorporating small modular reactors into the power solution makes sense since they can provide consistent baseload power, unlike solar, which doesn’t work at night. So, this shift in the investment landscape is very encouraging.

The other side of the equation is utility companies, which are regulated monopolies with a different risk tolerance and investment timeline. They may be interested in how new nuclear technology could integrate into their existing systems, especially given the retirement of old facilities. Existing connections to the grid could simplify the process, allowing new reactors to be easily integrated.

Okay, that’s it for me. Take care.