Peter Zeihan, Author at Zeihan on Geopolitics

Assassination Attempt and A Changing World

Butler County Fairgrounds where the Assassination Attempt of Donald Trump occurred

On Saturday, July 13, there was an attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I’m not here to give you the play-by-play that you can get from the news, instead I want to put this incident into context of the broader political and economic shifts.

America is experiencing a political realignment where party coalitions are breaking up and new factions are emerging. Trump, who has sparked some of these shifts, has both benefited from and lost supporters because of this. I’ve talked extensively about the economic shifts happening, but the global order is collapsing and most economies will be in a flux for a while.

With all this change, you can expect increased political and economic volatility, both domestically and internationally. You can parallel the present day shifts to times like the 1930s or Reconstruction in the US. While these changes might ultimately benefit the US, the transitionary period will be no snoozer…as evidenced by the events on July 13.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks. It is the 14th of July, and last night Donald Trump was lightly injured in an assassination attempt. I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow of what went down because the details are still very sketchy. It looks like it was a 20-year-old registered Republican who donated money to Democrats, which tells us absolutely nothing.

The Secret Service, of course, will be doing their own investigation in league with local law enforcement and the FBI. We will wait for more details to see where that takes us. But I wanted to put this all into context. There are a lot of things going on in the world right now that suggest we’re going to be in a more politically volatile period.

The first big thing is that America is going through its once-in-every-generation political rearrangement, something that Trump is part of. The Americans have a first-past-the-post, single-member district political system, which means that you vote for a single person who will then represent a very specific geography. You don’t vote for a party. In doing this, American parties tend to be fairly weak, and so they tend to be coalitions of coalitions. You get multiple political factions banding together around a single tent in order to get one more vote than whoever comes in second.

Today, for example, the Republican Party has traditionally been made up of people who are concerned with budget deficits, national security, business regulation, and social conservatives. As technology, demographics, and economic patterns evolve, the factions make less sense. The factions rise and fall within the coalitions, and if things get stressed enough, they end up falling out of the coalition altogether, maybe becoming swing voters or maybe going to the other side. What we’re seeing right now is that in spades for the Republican coalition. The business community, the national security community, and the fiscal community have all been basically ejected from the party, but Donald Trump has been successful in drawing other groups away from the Democratic coalition.

For example, union voters are no longer considered Democrats by their voting patterns, and Hispanics have shifted quite a bit. This is still very much a work in progress. Donald Trump is benefiting from this as much as he is losing from this. But if you think about what’s happened in the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve had the rise of hyper-globalization and now its fall. We’ve had the height of the baby boomers in the workforce and now their retirement. It’s not exactly a shock to think that we are going to manage our political system differently.

So that’s the first big piece: America politically is in movement. Second, the world economically is in movement. The whole point of the post-World War II global consensus was that the Americans would take care of the guns and keep everyone safe. The Americans would open the market and make the global sea safe for everyone’s commerce if, in exchange, you sided with the Americans in the Cold War. That provided the basis for everything from the alliance with Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to NATO. That’s created the world that we know. It’s also created the economic backdrop and the security backdrop that made the rise of China possible, because during the late Cold War, China was one of those allies.

Well, that whole system is breaking down. Two reasons: number one, the Americans can’t pay for it anymore and don’t want to. The Americans have refashioned their navy, so instead of hundreds of ships that can patrol the oceans, they have a few clusters of ships that are really good for fighting wars. So the ability to have that global coverage isn’t there. Americans politically are tired of paying the economic price of keeping the world open for everyone because it’s put everybody else at an advantage versus American workers. That just doesn’t fly in today’s populist era.

The second issue is that when you do economically develop, when you do industrialize, you also urbanize. After seven decades of urbanization, people are having fewer and fewer children around the world. Well, if you have fewer children for seven decades, it’s not that you’re running out of ten-year-olds and twenty-year-olds. You’re running out of fifty-year-olds and increasingly sixty-year-olds. This decade, the 2020s, was always going to be the decade that a lot of countries slipped away from having a workforce that can support the globalized system in the first place. After all, if you don’t have consumption, you don’t have trade.

So this whole system, the American political network, is evolving, and the global economic network is collapsing and reforming. What this all means is there’s a lot of change out there in the way we live, the way we work, who we service with our businesses, and where we get our goods. When things change, people with a vested interest in the system don’t always make it. People get scared, and people get angry. That is when you get violence. We’re going to get it at the state level with a series of military conflicts. The first of those is already happening in Ukraine. We’ll probably get one in China before long. In terms of political change in the United States, that’s when we get our domestic political violence.

It happened in the 1930s with the Great Depression and that political reorientation. It happened with Reconstruction, and it happened with the Civil War. So I don’t want to suggest that this is the beginning of more of the same. I’m saying that the factors that define our world are evolving, and we’re going to change with it. For the United States overall, this is a net gain in many, many ways. But going through the process of getting from where we’ve been and what we’re comfortable with to where we’re going, something that’s unknown, is unfortunately going to generate a lot of stresses along the way. We saw some of that last night.

Photo by Designism, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Should Europe Worry About the French Elections

After the first round of European Parliament elections, the French far-right (represented by the National Rally) had a great showing. President Macron wasn’t too happy with that outcome, so he called snap elections to give his party a second shot at capturing a majority.

There are a few reasons that Macron knew this might yield more favorable results. There is a known shift in voting patterns between first and second round votes, where voters start more emotional and end more practical. There are lots of voting tactics Macron’s party could use to garner some more votes, like removing multiple candidates to prop up a single one. The most important one here was the timing; the other parties didn’t have enough time to pull together strong candidates, so Macron’s party could use that to their advantage. And Macron was right…mostly.

The National Rally took third in the snap elections, Macron’s party took second, and the Left came in first. The French aren’t out of the woods quite yet though. Since none of the factions had a majority to form a government, we’re going to see some French cooperation, and you can expect how that will go.

The threat of political instability within France could prove to be a big problem for the rest of Europe too. Without France (attempting to be) at the helm, and no other countries fit to step into that role, Europe will need to figure something out ASAP.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks in southern Missouri. We’re going to finish up our election series today by talking about one of the most convoluted of the big elections that just happened last week, and that is France.

The backdrop is that a few weeks ago, we had European Parliament elections. The French hard-right, represented by a group that calls themselves the National Rally, did very, very, very, very well. The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who’s of a more centrist alliance, saw this as a threat and decided to try his hand at snap elections to force the French people to support a more pragmatic government, i.e., his. In a way, it worked out in two rounds of voting. At first, the National Rally did very, very, very, very well. Then they did very, very, very, very badly. Ultimately, they came in third behind a couple of other alliance groups, one on the left, one in the center, supporting Macron.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first reason is that there’s a typical pattern in French voting where, in your first vote in the first round, you vote your heart, and in the second vote, you vote your head. So, the idea is you might vote for what you’re passionate about the first time around, but you’re much more practical the second time around. That was definitely in play. A second reason is that there’s a lot of tactical voting where you could have five, six, seven, or eight candidates contesting the same seat in the first round. In the second round, basically everyone who was third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh dropped out in order to concentrate the oppositional votes to make sure that the National Rally would not get the seat. That meant that the National Rally went from being the faraway favorite to coming in a relatively distant third.

But the third, and far more important reason why the National Rally busted, was simply time. From the point Macron called the elections to the point that we had the first round, it was only two weeks, and then only another week before we had the second round, so they really didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. There are 577 parliament districts in France, and going into these elections, the National Rally really wasn’t a true national party in that they had representation and supporters in every single district. So when they had to come up with 577 candidates, one for each district, one who lived in each district, a lot of times they went with just some activists.

And if you guys are politically wired, you know that there are activists in your party who are wackadoo. There were some wild racists and some wildly incompetent people who found themselves on the ticket for the National Rally, which meant not just that they didn’t have a chance, but the candidates on the left and the center were able to parade these people nationwide and show what fools the National Rally were. At least that was their view. Take this together, especially that last piece, and it worked.

But we’re not out of the woods yet. Remember, there are three big factions here. You had the hard right, the National Rally, you had the centrists around Macron, and then you had this left alliance that is actually four different parties made up of radicals, communists, socialists, and Greens. They had the same problem that the National Rally had; they only had a couple of weeks to build this electoral alliance to contest the elections. While they came in first, they have nowhere near enough seats in parliament to run a government. Nobody does. In fact, if you were to take any of these three factions and throw all the minor parties in with them, there’s still not enough.

So to have a majority government, two of these three factions have to be able to work together. Well, no one wants to work with the National Rally, so that eliminates them. For the new leftist alliance, the single largest chunk is the party of a guy named Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The best way to describe this is he has the personal charm of Marjorie Taylor Greene in the United States, the intelligence of Cori Bush, makes up math like Elizabeth Warren, and has the personality of a cold, hairy pile of vomit. He’s a hateful person, he’s a snake, and no one wants to work with him. But his party in that four-group coalition that is the left alliance is the single largest.

We already have party leaders throughout the leftist alliance saying that Mélenchon is a problem and he will never be prime minister, but he now represents the single largest chunk of seats in parliament as part of that alliance. So we’re entering into something that is very unexpected and unfamiliar for France: political instability. The single largest party in the overall parliament, the National Rally, no one wants to work with. The ruling party that works with Macron has been a little bit discredited. The left is an absolute mess, with its titular leader being a complete moron. There is no clear path forward here.

This isn’t Israel, this isn’t Italy; no one here has experience building coalition governments. According to the French constitution, you can’t have another election to fix this at the ballot box within a year. So you take France, which until now has been the Eurozone country with the single strongest political leadership, and you basically remove it from play until such time as the French can find a way to make this work. I doubt that’s going to happen in this calendar year or next calendar year. This is a really bad time for Europe to not have leadership.

If you look around Europe and see what’s left, the French are out to lunch dealing with their own internal stuff. The Germans have a three-party coalition that is already incredibly weak, led by an even weaker chancellor. The next country down is Italy, which is led by someone on the right, Giorgia Meloni. That means if you’re the United States and Russia at this time, all of a sudden Europe has become a little bit of a piece of taffy to be pulled.

At the moment, because of the Ukraine war, that means the ball is very clearly in the United States’ court. But never forget, this is an election year in the United States too. Whether it’s Biden or Trump, it’s going to be difficult for Washington to focus the kind of attention on Europe that it honestly deserves right now.

So we basically took the last big pillar of European—not solidarity, not leadership, not democracy, but coordination—and we’ve knocked it down. This is going to be a big problem, as you’ll see in the next video, because this is only the beginning of what needs to be done within Europe.

Iran’s President-Elect Sparks Change, But How Much?

Next up on our list of important elections around the globe is the Iranian presidential elections. We’ll be looking at Iran’s new President-elect, Masoud Pezeshkian, and what his victory might mean for the country.

Pezeshkian triumphed over a number of slightly nutty, ultra-conservative, fire-breathing candidates sponsored by the clerical regime (which officially oversees the entire country). This presidential election has also highlighted some of the ongoing issues Iran has faced, especially the economic difficulties caused by US sanctions.

Pezeshkian’s platform follows a more moderate approach than his opponents and predecessors, and suggests a possible shift in domestic policies. As of now, these conversations are focused on smaller issues like the strict enforcement of a dress code for women, but when the majority of the Iranian populace rallies behind something like that…it could mean that something bigger is brewing. It’s far too early to make a call like that, but this is something that I’ll be keeping an eye on.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a rental car in Kansas City. Today, we are going to take a crack at the second piece in our elections series for the week. We had a number of important elections recently. Today, we’re going to cover Iran, where there was a runaway victory for the now president-elect Masoud Pezeshkian. And I apologize for the name. Anyway, he came in with a strong first place. There’s a two-round voting system in Iran, and it’s not really a surprise that he won.

There were any number of candidates in the first round, but five of them were sponsored by the clerical regime of Iran. You know, the slightly nutty, very ultra-conservative, hate-everyone group that runs the country.

Anyway, there were five candidates from that faction, and they were all fire-breathers. So having one moderate ensured that he made it to the second round, where he easily defeated his opponent, who was honestly a complete nutbag. So no surprise there.

But moving away from the tactical political stuff, the situation Iran is in is uncomfortable.

Dial back a little bit. If you remember back to the war in Iraq, the United States was very good at overthrowing the Saddam regime but not very good at making Iraq look like Wisconsin. So Iranian agents were able to step into the void and agitate the Shia population of Iraq. Shia is a denomination within Islam, and the Iranians are predominantly Shia. It’s also the single largest denomination in Iraq.

Saddam’s government was Sunni. So when the United States basically ripped out the apparatus of the old government and wasn’t quick enough in putting something else in its place, Iran was able to partially take over and still remains very influential there today.

During this period, while the United States was going after militants throughout the region, the Shia Iranians were able to step in, displace a lot of groups, cause a lot of trouble, and become very powerful throughout the region. But it wasn’t free. Iran has a financial restriction in that most of its income comes from oil.

So if you can target the oil, you can target Iran. Over the long term—not just days, weeks, or months, but decades—that really cripples them. Over the past 20 years, yes, Iran made a lot of forays, but it generated a lot of expenses.

When Saudi Arabia was roused to combat Iran, Iran was never going to win a game of checkbook diplomacy with a country that exports a fifth as much oil. Then under Obama, the United States put some of the strictest sanctions ever developed against Iran to pressure them into a nuclear deal to curb their nuclear ambitions. Under Donald Trump, who did away with the deal but kept the sanctions in place, these sanctions have now been in place for the better part of the last decade. We are seeing very real impacts on the standard of living in Iran because they haven’t been able to export the volume of oil necessary to sustain a meaningful standard of living within Iran, much less cause trouble throughout the region.

I don’t mean to suggest that Iran’s been curtailed or castrated, but they’re having a hard time doing everything they thought they would be able to do. When you have this sort of economic blindness, you can follow one of two paths. A few years ago, they tried electing a hardliner named Raisi, who everybody hated. He was a mean dude, and even within the clerical establishment, people thought he was too tough. Then he died in a plane crash a few weeks ago.

The new guy, Masoud Pezeshkian, is basically trying the other approach—maybe a little bit of compromise, maybe a more constructive relationship with the West. Now, I don’t want anyone to get too overexcited here. Yes, elections matter in Iran, but only within a certain framework. The most powerful person in Iran is not the president; it is the supreme leader, who remains a bag of snakes and is responsible for all the things you think of when you think of Iran: the clerical theocracy, the oppression of minorities and women, and the general seeding of militant groups throughout the Middle East. None of that has changed.

The new guy is not challenging much of that at all. In foreign policy, he has stated that he still supports Iran having a nuclear program and a hard line in negotiations with the West. He still supports the Houthis in their on-again, off-again conflict with Israel and Hamas against Israel. He still supports militancy throughout the region, but he’s doing it with a much different tone that suggests there might be a little room for compromise here or there. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, but there’s at least a change in mood.

If there is going to be a meaningful difference, it will happen at home. Pezeshkian has been very clear that he thinks the clerical authorities’ law enforcement arm shouldn’t beat women if they show their hair. From a geopolitical point of view, that’s kind of a nothing burger under normal circumstances. But now you have the majority of the population of Iran siding with the president against the people with the guns. That can go in a lot of interesting directions. Keep in mind that you’ve got 10,000 clerics, 10,000 mullahs, that basically rule Iran. It’s a deep bench. I’m not suggesting we’re going to have a revolution, but if the guy who’s nominally at the top, chosen by the people, wants a different approach to living your life in the country, and the people who have been calling the shots up to this point are on the opposite side of that, well, things can get very interesting.

So I don’t want to overplay this. I’m not suggesting a revolution, but for the first time in 40 years, there seems to be a split within the leadership of Iran on what Iran should be at home. And that’s how change starts.

Okay, that’s it for Iran. Tomorrow we’ll deal with France.

UK Elections: Starting Over

In case you’ve been buried neck deep in US political news, there are some fairly important elections taking place across the globe. For the first country in our little global election coverage, we’ll be looking at the United Kingdom.

The UK has had plenty of ups and downs throughout its history; from emerging as a global financial hub during the industrial revolution, to falling from grace in the post-World War II era, to joining the EU in the 70’s and revitalizing London as a financial center…and then starting the cycle all over again with Brexit. So, what’s the significance of the most recent election?

The Labour party took a nice victory and knocked out 2/3 of the ruling Conservatives from their seats. This will allow the Labour party to steer the direction of the country, but they’ll have their work cut out for them. If we’re going to see the UK regain significance, they’re going to have to undergo a comprehensive economic realignment OR swallow their pride, trade in their tea for coffee, and partner up with North America.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Mica Gulch in Colorado. It is the 8th of July, and I’m taking a quick break from hiking to update everybody on what’s been going on with all these crazy elections. We talked about the United States last week. you know, lots of hate mail from that one. so it’s only fair to cover three other countries that have had elections, over the last few days.

And they’re going to be the United Kingdom, Iran and France. And we’re going to do the United Kingdom today because it’s the simplest of the three, if you can believe that,

In order to understand where we are now, it really helps to start a couple hundred years ago. if you go back before the Industrial Revolution, if you go back before Deepwater navigation, the United Kingdom, or as it was known, England, really didn’t matter all that much. It was a relatively smallish population on a relatively large,

island off the coast of Europe. And most of the mainland countries, especially France, had a far larger population and were far more significant. But when deep water navigation was developed by the Iberians, eventually that technology migrated to a country that could use it better and that would be an island.

And that was the UK. And all the income that came from a deep water navigation empire, forced the United Kingdom to, well, induce the United Kingdom to do two things. Number one, all this income had to be processed and so we got things like the London Stock Exchange and the financial heart and the Square Mile and all the things that make London, London today a place where you process capital, put it into places around the world, will be more and more efficient.

And being the primary global node for the empire meant that it was the primary global node for everyone. Well, that was piece, one piece to all. This capital floating around the United Kingdom, meant that they you had a lot of people who were developing new ideas and eventually that manifested as the Industrial Revolution.

So that is basically what has always made the United Kingdom special, the ability to leverage deep water navigation and to take it somewhere else, to generate the new technologies of industrialization, to create a global financial hub. That is why London is London. That is why the UK is the UK. That is why we think of the UK as a world power.

But of course, history doesn’t stand still. Just as deep water navigation was a new suite of technologies and migrated to a place that could use it better, so too did industrialization, and it went to Germany, which generated the German Reich in time. And it went to the United States, which generates the country that we have here and that we know now, in addition, London was hardly the only financial hub.

Every country that has a mercantile existence or an empire has to have one. It’s just the Brits were first and largest. And if you look across the pond at the United States, you had New York, It started out as, at the mouth of the Hudson, and that was the big economic artery.

And eventually that was linked to the Great Lakes. But eventually you got the Cumberland Road, which dumped a lot of product out in the Chesapeake, which was really close to New York. And eventually the Great Lakes and the Cumberland Road ended up in, the middle of the continent with the Mississippi River system and all of the cargo that went up and down the Mississippi could also use the barrier island changed to make it all the way back to the Chesapeake.

And oh, look at and behold, you’re pretty close to New York again. So without having an empire in the classic sense, New York became the financial hub, primary financial

By some measures, almost only financial for the United States. And so when you get into the post-World War Two environment, things got a little dodgy for the Brits.

What made them special about industrialization had moved on. What made them special about finance had competition. And in the post-World War Two environment, the Americans made it very clear that if you wanted the American security guarantee, all of your colonies had to be able to go their own way. And so the empire that had made London, London one anyway, and we saw a catastrophic drop in the United Kingdom’s, global reach, their standard of living, their significance and their wealth until the early 1970s, when the United Kingdom successfully joined the European Union.

Now, say what you will about the rest of the Europeans. Finance was never their forte. They tended to be more socialist, statist economies. And so when you had all this apparatus of financial strength and London looking for something to do, it was very quickly, it was very quickly able to emerge, not as a global financial hub, but as a European financial hub.

And while they had lost their global empire from a financial point of view, it’s like they got a new one in Europe. And so German, Spanish, French and Italian finance and all the rest came to London. And so from 1970, what year did they get in? 73, 71, early 70s until relatively recently, it was a model that worked really well.

And because of the sheer bulk of Europe and because of the trading, capacity of Europe, London once again was a strong financial hub until a few years ago, when the Brits voted themselves out of the European Union without a backup plan. For the last few years, under the conservative governments of Theresa may and Boris Johnson, and on and on and on, they’ve had like, what, seven GS anyway?

The Brits have basically been trying to have their cake and eat it too, after voting. That cake is illegal. it’s basically what it comes down to. They’ve shut themselves off from the European system and induced the Europeans to grab as much of the financial clout that London used to have as possible. The Americans, of course, have taken more than their fair share as well.

And that just leaves the United Kingdom with what’s generated by the United Kingdom, and then a few stray wasps here and there. They made a go at being the, completely unethical hub, particularly for Russian money. but in the aftermath of the Ukraine war, a lot of that has lost its luster.

And if you want to do Arabic financing, you’re not going to come to London, you’re going to go to Dubai. So all of the financial flows that made London an industrial and a financial hub are pretty much gone. And the last big chunk is gone because the Brits voted themselves out of the system. So what we have now is not so much a shift from the right to the left.

If you guys haven’t seen the election results, they’re pretty damning. the conservatives lost roughly two thirds of their seats. The ruling Conservatives and Labor, which has been in opposition for the last 14 years, basically doubled their seat count and will be able to rule without needing a coalition partner. But this isn’t a shift from conservative policies to liberal policies.

This is simply a reflection of the catastrophic reduction in economic possibilities that Brexit has imposed upon the United Kingdom, and blaming the government, who happens to be in charge.

Whether that is fair and out, of course, is, dependent upon your personal politics. But for the United Kingdom to matter again, one of two things has to happen.

Number one, it needs to join another group, or it is far and away going to be the financial hub. That’s not going to be Europe. They’re not going to get back into Europe. Even if they apply right now, unless they agree to a lot of strictures. That was what induced them to leave in the first place. Or second, they have to have a top to bottom root and branch economic reformation to reflects the fact that the London financial hub is no more.

And what made them special in the industrial era has changed as well. They need a new way to build and they need a new way to process. They need a new way to manufacture and most importantly, they have to have access to a large market to absorb a lot of the output. Considering that the world is globalizing, that’s a really tall offer.

Considering that the Europeans are no longer in a position where they can absorb British goods, and that’s not even an option. The only option is North America, and that means integrating with North America. North America’s terms. That will guarantee an end to London as a financial hub, because under the terms of any trade deal, New York will absorb all of that, and it will certainly restructure what’s left of British manufacturing to satisfy NAFTA goals. And that means a lot of investment into Mexico from the Brits. And that means changing a lot of the norms that the Brits have gotten used to to match American and Canadian norms. So no matter how this goes from here, what has made the United Kingdom special is gone. And what remains to be seen is whether the new government under labor can really wrap their arms and their minds around the scale of the change to the British condition that has to be implemented here. If Britain is going to be anything other than a failing middle power, which is perhaps what the Brits fear more than anything.

China After Xi

TECHNOVATION INTERVIEW

Here is a link to my interview with Peter High on Technovation. We covered topics intersecting demography, economics, energy, politics, technology, and security.

I get a lot of “what if…” and “what happens next…” style questions and most of them suck, but today’s question takes us down a fairly interesting rabbit hole – what happens to China if Chairman Xi Jinping dies or steps down?

Remember, I didn’t say that this rabbit hole was going to be a happy one, just that it was interesting. So instead of the headlines reading “China Flourishes Following the Death of Xi Jinping”, I would expect something more along the lines of “China Moves One Step Closer to Collapse”.

Between the gutted political system that Xi would leave in his wake and a faltering economy, China wouldn’t exactly be set up for success. The Chinese would likely have to scrap their current state structure and develop an entirely new system.

The bottom line is that Xi Jinping has caused plenty of problems during his time leading the country, but removing him from the picture isn’t going to magically solve those problems overnight.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado’s lost wilderness. This is a lost canyon. A little bit of a bushwhack, but it’s been a good day. anyway, I’ve started my backpacking season, so we’re going to be taking a lot of entries from the ask Peter Files. I’ll try to do some current event ones, but, you know, I’m not going to be able to upload every day, so, you know, it is what it is.

Anyway, today’s entry is what happens to China when Xi dies. So, you know, that’s a great question. a couple things to keep in mind. A number one has, imprisoned and executed his way into being a cult of personality. There is no successor. There is no potential successor. There is no up and coming cadre of people with talent.

He is basically purge the entire system of any within of ambition or competence. And so it is just him and the bureaucracy now is going after things like patents and college dissertations, so that no one who is under age 25 can even get into the system in the first place. So it is just Xi, it is Xi alone, and he will ride the system into the ground.

It’s so much worse than that sounds because China is not a normal country. So there are different sorts of governing systems. confederal federal and unitary, confederal. Your regions have more power than the center. So think Switzerland or Canada. In a federal system, there’s a shared competence, among the national government, the regional government and the local governments think Germany or maybe the United States.

And then there are unitary systems where, the national government basically sets all policy and everyone just has to go along with it. that’s Russia, that is France, that is Argentina. technically,

China’s federal, but because of the purges and because of the control of the Communist Party, it is basically become super unitary, where everything that happens in Beijing is the only thing that matters, because she is purged all of the regional local governments of anyone who has any capacity.

There’s additional problem here. and that’s just the geography of China itself. it is not an easy place to rule. You have a lot of varied geographies that look to different parts of the world, much less different parts of the country for leadership and economic growth. So, for example, if you’re in the series of cities on the southern coast, roughly from Fujian to Gwangju, you don’t have an interior, you don’t have access to local agricultural product, and you don’t have access to one another.

What infrastructure exists in this area has been built just in the last 30 years, and I don’t mean to suggest it’s not impressive by any standards it is, but it’s nothing like, say, being in the Midwest or in northern Germany, where the land is flat and infrastructure is easy. And so all these cities have their own individual identities.

And historically speaking, all of them have gotten the majority of their calories going back 1500 years from somewhere not on the Asian mainland. Then you got the center section from Shanghai up to,

Chongqing. There we go. Oh, the one province. this is kind of the. This is the area of the Yangtze River. This kind of the Mississippi of China.

Think of it. It is Detroit and Minneapolis and Saint Louis and New Orleans and Houston all in one. definitely a discrete economic unit with discrete political and cultural identity. And then you’ve got the North, the north China playing around, the yellow River. This is an area that is pretty flat. And the problem is, is it’s just it’s been too big, historically speaking, to be all under one power until the industrial era.

And so you would generally have warlords trying to take over individual chunks of the territory. And because this is also a flood and drought prone area, the waterworks were necessary to maintain the population. So when a warlord thought he was going to lose or wanted to launch an attack on a neighbor, he’d go after the waterworks anyway. So you get this nationalistic, militaristic north.

You get kind of a corporatist industrial financial center. And then what has traditionally been a secession of South and keeping these all under the same rubric, under the same governing system is hard. And so you have to basically look at Chinese history from this point of view and that there’s kind of two models. Model number one is each region has as much autonomy as it can stomach.

And the whole thing spins apart. In the north in particular falls into civil war. There’s a reason why all of China’s dynasties never last very long. It’s hard to hold this all together, or you overcompensate the other direction and hyper concentrate authority in Beijing under the Emperor, or now under the Communist Party general secretary, and hold everything as tight as possible.

Neither of them last for long, and unfortunately, there’s nothing in between that works really well either. Kind of a confederal system would just lead to friction and eventually conflict among the various sections. Well, at the moment we are clearly having a hyper centralized system. So we have a hyper centralized system in a geography that is difficult to govern.

But now everything is being all the decisions being made in Beijing, we have a unitary system because the party is eliminated. Everyone who isn’t Xi and Xi himself is not a spring chicken. I mean, he’s not like Biden or Trump old, but the dude can’t be around for much longer and there’s no one in the wings waiting to take over. So when this breaks, you take the most hyper centralized

Iteration of China we have ever had? And you cut off the head at a time when the country is facing financial overextension and a demographic collapse. So when Xi dies, however, that happens, there will not be another government of China.

We will be facing state dissolution because the demographic situation is so bad, it’s entirely feasible that we have a collapse in the country’s ability to generate any economic activity. Of note, before such time as something can theoretically rise on the other side of this. So we could we probably are looking at the end of the Han ethnicity as a player in international affairs, because by the time we get to the end of the century, there aren’t going to be a lot of them left. So when Xi goes, that’s it, the party’s over. All right, so you guys from the next canyon.

Photo by © European Union, 2024, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Genoa Is Graying: Italy’s Demographic Decline

While the Italians may have mastered the arts of pasta, wine and gelato, they should have been spending less time in the kitchen and more in…another room. That’s right, we’re looking at the demographic problems facing Italy, and Genoa will be our example.

The population of Genoa in 1972 was 950,000. Today, it is under 680,000. The scary part is that Genoa isn’t an isolated instance. Italy’s birth rate has been below replacement level for over 75 years, leading to an aging population and a shrinking tax base. The scarier part is that Italy is just one example of a country facing demographic collapse, as places like Germany, Romania, and Spain are all in the same boat.

Unfortunately, there’s really no practical solutions for these countries to remedy this issue. Sustaining their economies and state functions without a younger generation won’t be easy, but at least we’ll see how nations can adapt to these demographic challenges.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Genoa, Italy. And I’m going to do something a little bit different today. I am going to show you the world through my eyes. Let’s turn this around. We’re over the business district in the central Genoa, and it’s not the buildings in the foreground I want you to see. It’s the ones in the background.

The ones that are in more residential. You’ll notice that not a lot of them have a lot of lights on it. And over here we’re starting to go a the old town similar situation. And as we move over here you can see the train station kind of Grand Central if you will, and then up on the hill is mostly residential spots.

But you’ll notice that even though it’s 10:00 at night, which is, you know, when everyone’s getting home from dinner in Italy, most of the buildings are less than one third lit up. Some of them, well, less than a quarter. the issue is that for the entirety of my life, Genoa one has been shrinking in population terms.

And I turned 50 this year. 1972 was the last year that the city saw it increase in population. And that is pretty typical for Italian cities writ large. Unfortunately, Italy is going through a population crash and it’s well past the point of no return. the birth rate has been below two, births per woman for in excess of three quarters of a century.

And over the next five years, the population bulge that exists in many countries exists here, too, but they move into mass retirement now, I’ve been traveling through Italy for about ten days now, and I’ve begun to a lot of small towns and, you know, they’re they’re full of old people and not a lot of them. and everyone has the same refrains, like all the young people were picked up to move to the cities.

But now that I’m in one of the major cities, I can see that’s not the case. It’s just people haven’t been born here for a very long time, and now we’re looking at the dissolution of the tax base that is necessary to maintain a modern, civilized location. the the smart play here would be to turn back time and go back to the 1970s and figure out a way to make it easier for young people to have children.

but at this point, the only theoretical solution would be to bring in Canadian style levels of immigration and a sudden wave that never ends. simply in order to stabilize the Italian population in its current structure, which is already the oldest demographic and the fastest aging demographic in Europe, would be to bring in somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people under age 35 every year from now on, which, of course, would end Italy in its current form.

Some version of this problem exists in huge portions of the world. Europe, of course, is where I’m thinking right now, because this is where I am. The Germans are only a few years, no more than five behind the Italians. And then there are a number of other countries that are a little bit younger but are actually aging faster.

Whether it’s Romania or Spain. Poland still has a chance for demographic reconstitution, but only if they get on it right now. the Russians are in a position. The Ukrainians are in a worse position. And, East Asia, Taiwan is kind of where Poland is right now, whereas Japan and Italy are very, very similar. and the Koreans are about where the Germans are.

So we’re seeing this over and over and over throughout the world. accelerated urbanization over the last 50 to 75 years has generated a population structure that is so old and aging so quickly, the reconstitution is no longer possible. And a number of the advanced states Italy, Germany, Korea, Japan, the next decade is going to provide a new model for us, populations in countries that are no longer capable of mass consumption or mass investment or max tax generation.

At the same time their populations move into mass retirement. something’s going to have to give, whether it will be state coherence or the finances or the economic model. First, everyone’s got to figure that out for themselves.

The Federal Reserve and Its Inflation Target

For all the hungover Americans out there, I heard the best cure after a long day of drinking is to talk about inflation. Well, maybe it will just make your head hurt more, but you still have the weekend ahead of you to relax…

The Federal Reserve has been juggling lots of different things over the past few years, and attempting to keep our system balanced is no easy feat; however, the Fed’s job is just getting started. With the need for a massive industrial buildout coming down the pipe, raising rates could hinder this expansion and cause a huge swatch of problems. Then the Fed will have to factor in the decline in population growth which is creating a low-demand environment, necessitating an entirely new economic model.

So yeah, the Federal Reserve has their work cut out for them, but don’t worry too much. The Fed’s actions should remain effective and US economic growth should remain strong…if anything (like inflation) does run awry, we might see some “legislative intervention”.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from the lost wilderness in Colorado. This is Lost Canyon, which I found myself in and turned out to be a little bit more than I bargained for. Anyway, we’re taking questions from the Ask Peter Forum today. One question is about my prediction of facing several years of inflation at 10% or higher and whether the Federal Reserve should revise its policy on interest rates.

For those of you who are not financial aficionados, the prime rate is what the Fed sets. The idea is to keep it low enough to generate economic activity by making credit cheaper, but high enough that demand doesn’t get out of control and generate runaway inflation. If we’re looking at a 10% inflation rate, that’s a bit of a problem because the Federal Reserve targets a 2% inflation rate.

So, big difference. And, a little bit of rain. We’ll continue this in a minute.

During the financial crisis into Covid, we were basically at a 0% prime rate. We’ve been ticking up ever since. The Fed recently met and it’s around, let’s call it 5.5%, 6%, somewhere in there.

Anyway, the question is whether they should go higher.

Yes and no. First and foremost, the Fed is going to be wrestling with things that I can’t even imagine. So I’m not the kind of guy who says the Fed should do this or that. I would just say that the Fed has a lot of tools. As we saw during Covid and the decade before, they can use them in ever more creative ways. However, the key thing to keep in mind is that the reason we’re going to be having these high inflation rates is not necessarily because of growth per se, although that will be part of it, but also because we’re going to be doing a historically unprecedented industrial buildout. We basically need to double the size of the industrial plant and probably increase the amount of processing capacity we have for raw materials by a factor of ten. That’s going to use a lot of electricity, a fair amount of labor, and a huge amount of land. Normally, if the Federal Reserve was looking to get inflation under control, they would raise interest rates to make borrowing more expensive.

But if you do that now, you’re going to choke off that industrial expansion. We’re not engaging in this industrial expansion because we think it’s just a peachy keen idea. This is not normal economic activity. No, no, no. We’re anticipating the collapse of the Chinese and, to a lesser degree, the European industrial systems. So if we still want manufactured goods, we have to build the manufacturing plant.

If you were to raise rates in that environment, you would choke it off, and we would be left with higher costs of living because of a lack of goods rather than because of inflation. So basically, we get the worst of all worlds. There’s another reason why I’m not going to be needling the Federal Reserve to do anything specific.

That’s because the rules, as we understand them, are changing. Going back to the dawn of the first era of globalization that Columbus kicked off in 1500, economic activity on this earth has been based on more interaction, larger populations, more interconnections, greater financial penetration, more markets, and more technology. The core of all of that is more people. Well, that’s not happening anymore.

Countries as diverse as Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Germany, Spain, Poland, and Russia—they’ve all aged out. It’s not that they’re going to die in the next year, although some of them are getting close, but they will never have larger populations again unless something really weird happens with migration. So if you remove that component—larger and larger populations—that has undergirded economic activity for the last 500 years, we need a new model. Because if it’s not based on population expansion and the market expansion that comes from that, what is it based on? Well, we don’t know. Any guide that we have is literally futile—500 years ago or more. So we’re going to have to figure out something new. We’re going to figure it out as we go.

Now, the advantage that the Federal Reserve has in this is that the United States is the first world country that does not face the same degree of demographic degradation as everyone else. Yes, the American birthrate has recently dropped by quite a bit. Millennials have more kids. But if we keep dropping at our current rate, we’re not going to be in the same situation as China, Germany, Korea, or Italy for another probably 40 to 60 years.

So we will get to see what everyone else does with monetary policy in an environment where there’s no demand to regulate. Because, let’s be honest here, interest rates going up and down—all that is designed to do is to regulate the amount of demand in the economy. And if your populations are declining, there’s no demand left.

So the Federal Reserve has more tools, its tools work better, and it’s a growth story. So regardless of what happens with policy, this is still a pretty positive outcome. The only way that I can see that the Federal Reserve might be forced to do something different is if inflation gets to the point that it becomes a political problem. Then the executive and legislative branches of the US government might work together to pass a law to tell the Federal Reserve what its goals are and how to achieve them.

We’re nowhere near that yet, but I would argue that’s the thing to look for—not this year, not next year, but thereafter. Alright, let’s see if I can get out of this canyon. Take care.

The Senior Home Showdown: Delusional Biden vs. Demented Trump

If you watched the presidential debate last week, I’m sure you’re really, really excited for the election this year! Since so many of you wanted me to talk about this fever dream we’re living in, I figured we’d do it on Independence Day.

For those that didn’t catch the debate, you can just head to your local retirement home and get the same experience from a couple of relics living there. The gist is that neither of these candidates are fit for office and a vote for either of them is a threat to national stability. Great Grandpa Biden – I mean President Biden – revealed how much his cognitive abilities have declined, slipping deeper into his deluded state. Trump was off in his demented-fairyland-state where lies are currency and angry tantrums are the status-quo.

At the end of the day, not much has changed since my first prediction.

The “true” independents will play a critical role in deciding the outcome of this election. Biden still has the upper hand, but Trump isn’t going down without a fight – and his cult followers will be sure of that. There is an opportunity for Biden to step down and have a more qualified candidate step up at an open convention, as long as its not someone like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. And let’s be realistic, no other Republican candidates can challenge Trump’s grip on the party.

So, in all likelihood we’re looking at a 2020 rematch, with candidates who are four years older, less capable, and more embarrassing than before. Would someone be able to pinch me?

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from the lost wilderness in Colorado. I’m just outside of Devil’s Playground.

I was backpacking in New Mexico last week when the presidential debate happened on purpose. Because I didn’t want to watch it live. Because I still have a hangover from one four years ago. anyway, I’ve since watched it, and I have.

How should I put this? Received a river of requests, for an update. And what this means to my forecast for the election. Some of you have been really, really rude about it, and you guys can stuff it. But for everybody else, Joe Biden obviously did not have a good day. he appeared confused, a little lost.

It wasn’t clear that he knew exactly where he was. And a lot of his responses, especially in the early half of the, debate, were just almost nonsensical. The term for what is happening to Joe Biden is that his mind is diluting. He’s losing control of the contact between the context of his memories and his life and the reality about him.

And this makes him slow and confused. And for anyone who has been watching him for the last year, you’ll notice that this is not a new thing. This has been happened with greater rapidity.

it’s been happening in press conferences and the Oval Office and briefings. it’s it’s getting bad.

now, I’m sure there are a lot of us out there who have parents or grandparents who are diluting, and it’s painful and it’s awkward, and eventually you get forgot. And it’s there are good days and there are bad days, but that’s not what you need for a president, because as you get older and Joe Biden is already 81, the number of bad days eventually tends to overwhelm the number of good days.

And he is no longer fit for office. He shouldn’t be running for president. He shouldn’t be president. And a vote for him is a vote against national stability in the United States. Let’s talk about the other guy now in the debate. I’d argue that 75 to 80% of everything that came out of Donald Trump’s mouth was boldfaced lies.

Most of those lies have been proven wrong in court on multiple occasions. he did have a few new ones that he brought out. Most of those were from Vidic River. if you remember, back to the Republican primaries earlier this year. Romsami, he was clearly the candidate who was most detached from reality.

The term for what’s going on with Donald Trump is that his mind is demented. he’s very sure of where he is because he just made it up. he lives in a bubble of his own mental creation. And when you’re like that and somebody pokes into your bubble, you get very, very, very angry. this is something we’ve seen out of Donald Trump for some time, but it’s really accelerated since he lost the presidential reelection me, three years ago.And he definitely doubled and tripled down on that in the debate. We all know someone who’s going through this either themselves or caring for them. caring for somebody with dementia is awful because you get yelled at a lot and it’s difficult to reconcile, you know, a loved one’s broken view of the world with who they used to be.

There are good days and there are bad days. But I think we all agree that as you get older and Donald Trump is now 79, significantly older than Hillary Clinton was when he said that she was too old to run for president. As you get older, eventually the bad days outnumber the good days, and Donald Trump is no longer fit to be president.

And a vote for him is a vote against national stability in the United States. And these are our choices. And so in the next part, I’m going to tell you how this is going to go. But we’ll do that from a different vista.

So where does this take us? I see two paths forward. The first is the path I identified a year and a half ago now. And we will include a link to that original video, in this one and in the written supporting materials. all of the things that I pointed out at that point still remain true.

I will pull out one that is even more relevant now, and that’s independents. Now, when I say independents, I’m not talking about the roughly 30 to 40% of Americans who are not registered as a Republican or a Democrat. No, no, no. of that 30 to 40%, almost all of them, vote with one party or the other 90% of the time.

They’re not independents. I’m talking about the true vote splitters, the 10% in the middle that have decided every American election in modern history. they don’t like either candidate. I’m one of those independents. Makes me a little sick to my stomach myself. Biden may have gotten a decent start, but he’s clearly not there anymore. He may have an okay team, but that’s not enough.

you need the person at the top. Top to be capable and conscious and cognizant. That’s not Biden anymore. however, on the other side, we have Donald Trump, who, part of his dementia is that his insistence that he the election was stolen from him, despite the fact that members of his own administration who were in charge of election integrity, say that it was the cleanest election ever.

his particular dementia threatens independence because he’s telling people that the general election doesn’t matter and everything should be decided in primaries where he does well. And of course, he does well in primaries, because the MAGA crowd will do whatever he says and they will show up in force to the primaries even when he’s not campaigning for them.

His ability to sweep the primaries without lifting a finger this time around, that was actually really impressive. But if you’re an independent, it means that your vote goes away. so it’s a choice between someone who’s deluded or someone who’s

Dementia will destroy your ability to vote from the future. And, you know, that’s a no contest. also, never forget that there are more Democrats than Republicans.

So Joe Biden does not need to capture the independent vote to win if the independents just don’t show up because they’re disgusted with both, that’s a victory for Biden. And so my general assessment that this is Biden’s election, no matter what happens, as long as he remains alive, stands a little sick to my stomach. This is an ugly choice, but it’s not a particularly difficult one.

There is one other way that this could go. friends and families and colleagues of Joe Biden are now advising that he consider stepping down and let a more capable candidate, run, which I think would be a great idea. Now, there’ve been people on both sides, maintain the Democrats and old school Republicans, people who are Republicans.

Before Trump took over the party, who insist that if either side were able to float a better candidate, that they would just sweep because these two candidates are so broken and I understand where they’re coming from. The problem is the process of getting to that. the primaries are functionally over. and on the Democratic side, it’s very weird for you get to get a meaningful challenger, for the nomination.

when you have somebody who’s already in office and that this is no exception. the difference this time around is that Biden might willingly step down. And if he does that, we will have what’s called an open convention. But that is not a slam dunk. and for this, I blame Barack Obama. one of the reasons why I think Barack Obama will go down in history is one of the bottom 10% of presidents we’ve ever had.

One of the many reasons is he functionally destroyed the Democratic Party’s ability to generate talent. when he ran for president, he formed his own organization and ran in parallel. And then when he got enough momentum, he basically co-opted the Democratic Party institution for his own purposes, something similar to what, Donald Trump did. in doing so, he made it all about him.

And then for the next eight years, he sucked all the oxygen out of the room and prevented a new generation of political leaders from rising up within the party. And so that’s why we have folks like Schumer and Pelosi who are almost as old as Biden, who are the powerbrokers in Congress. And a new generation is really having a hard time getting going now.

they’ve started, but it’s probably too late, certainly too late for the cycle. And that means that the only people who are willing to run for president in the primary system are those ideological idiots like, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, who can draw national support and kind of like Trump with MAGA, get people to show up in numbers to the primaries, even if people would normally not consider themselves Democrats.

if you have an open convention, those ideological idiots will be there. But the advantage of an open convention is you might get normal politicians, God forbid, there. So I have always been a fan in the American political system of the governors, because they have to deal with day in, day out issues and actually make the trains run on time and they have to govern across the aisle.

And we haven’t had a meaningful governor run on the Democratic side for a bit. And on the Republican side, it’s just been overwhelmed, by Donald Trump

So for an open convention, we might actually because it’s just going to be for like a few weeks instead of this endless campaigning system that we seem to have normally, a governor could throw his or her hat in the ring, not have to deal with all the shit of all the ideological wars, and actually get a good candidate.

And that is a way that the Democrats could have a complete blowout of the system of the election. It is possible, but it’s also possible you could get Elizabeth Warren, who was like one of three people on this planet that Donald Trump could beat. This can’t happen on the Republican side. Donald Trump has destroyed the Republican Party. He’s purged of anyone who was against him.

And the real, breakpoint was back in March when he took over the Republican National Committee. And the first thing he did was purge anyone who had anything to do with polling or candidate selection or basically fact gathering. Anyone who had any experience in politics, and basically replaced them all with his flunkies. So Trump, even if he dies tomorrow, will probably still be the Republican nominee this round.

His grip on what’s left of the Republican Party is that firm.

Okay. That’s it for me today. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of delusion versus Dementia and its After Effects. as always, with all of my domestic political, videos, I invite you to send outraged messages to the collection email spot, which is [email protected] that’s [email protected]. And I promise I will put personally review and respond to each and every None of them. Until next time.

Joe Biden: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (source: Joe Biden); User:TDKR Chicago 101 (clipping)Donald Trump: Shealah Craighead (source: White House)Сombination: krassotkin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why We Can’t Quit Russian Oil: The 10% That Holds the West Hostage

Despite most countries in the West wanting to rid themselves of any involvement with the Russians, the oil revenues continue to flow into Russian pockets. So why haven’t Western countries dropped the hammer on Russian oil exports?

Russian oil accounts for roughly 10% of the global energy supply. If you take that away, everyone in the world is going to feel the heat (or lack thereof). No leader, especially a US President, is willing to bite that inflation causing bullet.

This boils down to one thing, is the fallout worth it? If the US severs ties to global energy markets, that could cause a global crisis or depression, and even fracture the Western alliance. Not ideal. Enforcing a Russian oil ban could lead to escalation and military involvement…also, not ideal.

In a perfect world, ties to Russian oil would have been cut long ago. But we’re not learning our ABCs here, these are major decisions that could drastically change the trajectory of the world as we know it.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the French-Italian border on the Mediterranean. And today we’re going to take an entry from the Ask Peter forum, specifically, if the goal of the West in Ukraine is to ultimately, break the Russian military, then wouldn’t it make sense to simply go after the what are currently the legal oil revenues, put them under full sanction, actually interrupt the flows?

right now, the official policy of the Western nations is to keep the oil flowing from Russia, but do so in a way that prevents the Russians from overly profiting from it. there are two ways that the Russians get their crude to market. Number one is in compliance with the sanctions, where other people provide insurance, other fraud shipping on the second is via something called the shadow fleet, which may be as many as 20% of the tankers that are out there now that are no longer registered to anyone.

they simply shovel crude back and forth doing CTC transfers, taking them from Russian ports direct to third parties who don’t care about the sanctions very much, and allowing the Russians to circumvent things like price caps. it’s a reasonable question. And if, if, if this war is ever going to end in a way that actually breaks Russian power, Russian income has to be destroyed as part of that process.

But to make that happen, there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage along the way. So a couple things to keep in mind. first of all, if you’re going to take this stuff offline, there’s a lot of it to go. Russia exports roughly 5.3 million barrels of crude per day and about 2.6 million barrels per day of refined product.

Of that, only about 1 million barrels of crude is exported by pipe to China Direct, and maybe 300 to 400,000 barrels a day of refined product. Israel. That’s China. The rest of it has to hit a port somewhere and then be part of this shadow fleet or the sanctions regime system. So you’re talking about a disruption of at least 6 million barrels per day of oil and oil products.

That’s huge. that is well over 10% of globally traded, energy product by volume. And for those of you guys who’ve forgotten your basic economics, oil demand and fuel oil demand is inelastic. So if you only have a disruption of, say, 5 to 10% in terms of output and production, you can get a price increase of 50 to 100% or more.

Because if you don’t have the crude, if you don’t have the gasoline, you just can’t carry out normal economic activity. So your pay whatever you have to. That’s one of the reasons why the recessions in the 70s and the 80s were so severe, because everyone was dependent on this stuff, and when some of it not even very much went away, well, shit hit the fan.

So if, if, if, if this were to happen, you would deal with a major price shock in the case of a populist government like Joe Biden’s here in the United States, that means inflation. And that means that his perception is that the political floor would fall out from under him. In any chance he had a reelection would go away.

so this is something that has not been seriously considered in most Western capitals, most notably in the United States. there is one way you can get around that, and that is to use existing power that Congress has already granted the president to sever the United States from global energy markets. right now, actually for nine years now, ever since, I think it was the 2015 omnibus bill, Congress has granted the president the authority to end oil exports.

And if you did that, since the U.S. is a net exporter now, you’d have a supersaturated oil market in North America, angle America specifically, while you would also have a removal of another 3 to 5 million barrels a day of crude and refined product from the rest of the world. So basically, you double down on the elasticity problem for the rest of the world and cause a massive global depression.

At the same time, North America has a few problems with crude quality. This lady does on its own way. if if if that were to happen, you could probably kiss the Western Alliance largely goodbye, because the white House would have consciously chosen to favor its own domestic political issues and some economic issues, to be perfectly honest, against the security and economic needs in the long term, basically the entire alliance structure.

Then there’s also the issue of enforcement. You can’t just, like, wave your hand and say, no, this stuff isn’t allowed. You have to do something about it. And your options are to go in and bomb Russian ports, which would trigger, let’s just say, other issues, or to go after the shadow Fleet itself to take those ships out of circulation.

I mean, they’re all basically owned by the Russians at this point, but they’re shipping crude primarily to China and India. So if you basically declare or have an undeclared economic war against those two countries, that complicates a lot of things very, very quickly. Now, will we get there in the end? Yeah, probably. but that requires pulling out all the stops and a lot of strategic questions that, would occupy a great deal of political bandwidth for any government.

In the end, if the United States really if the goal really is to break Russia, then there needs to be changes to military policy to make sure that the Ukrainians can strike logistical hubs within Russia. And it means an end to Russian energy exports at a large enough scale to break the income flows that are necessary to keep the Russian military machine running.

We are not there yet. I’m not saying we’re not going to get there. In fact, I would argue we are. But that requires a significant change in the political and economic calculus of all the Western capitals, first and foremost, the United States. So good question. I’m not yet.

No More Military Exemption for Israeli Ultra-Orthodox

The demographic pyramids below reflect the Israeli government’s best (public) understanding of the changing profile of its population. The two fastest-growing segments are Palestinian-identifying Muslim Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis. Not only do these two groups have starkly different ideas about what the future of disputed territories look like, they have increasingly little common ground with what one might call the more secular, moderate core of Israeli society at large.

The Israeli Supreme Court just ruled that the ultra-Orthodox community will no longer get exemption from military service. This addresses a number of long-standing issues, but it could spell trouble for Netanyahu’s political career.

The ultra-Orthodox community makes up 10-20% of the population, pays less taxes relative to their share of the population than secular Israelis, receives subsidies, has low labor participation…so until now, the rest of the population has been picking up the slack. By eliminating military exemption for the ultra-Orthodox community, that extra weight can be lifted from the remaining population.

As you would expect, the ultra-Orthodox aren’t thrilled with this decision and they’ll likely be making that known politically. Since the ultra-Orthodox parties are key supporters of Netanyahu’s coalition, don’t be surprised if we see some changes soon. This will only be amplified by criticisms of Netanyahu’s handling of the Hamas conflict and strategic incompetence.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know 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. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides 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. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from square top mountain and back behind me is Argentine Peak. Edwards. And I think Kelso. It’s the 25th of June. And today we’re to talk about what’s going down in Israel. the Supreme Court just ruled that the country’s ultra-Orthodox, who have been granted exemptions from serving in the military for decades, can no longer give exemptions because it’s a discriminatory long term issue, is that, the ultra-Orthodox are somewhere between 10 and 20% of, Israel’s population, based on where you draw the number.

And since they pay very low taxes and qualify for all kinds of subsidies and don’t serve, most of them don’t work. And so they have high, very, very, very, very high birth rates, very, very low labor participation rates. And they don’t serve in the military. so there is an issue that has to become a larger and larger percentage of the population, just the the sheer weight of what, is then dropped on the shoulders of everybody else becomes almost insurmountable.

Keep in mind that there is an Arab minority in Israel that, secular, not like they’re protesting or throwing bombs or anything, but it’s a very real issue from a national identity and a social management point of view. there’s also a short term issue that has to do with the Netanyahu government. most of the parties that subscribe to ultra-Orthodox are part of Netanyahu, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s governing coalition, and have been for quite some time.

Israel’s had a lot of government the last 20 years when since Netanyahu kind of came into the burst on the field, he’s definitely their longest running prime minister overall. Anyway, what’s the best way I can put this into American terms? Think of Matt Gates. You know, the guy from Florida with really good hair, talks a lot of shit about the military, but thinks that the military is a solution to everything.

We should bomb this country and invade that country. But he’s never served. so take blowhards who don’t really contribute to the system, thinking that they know best about how to use military power. strip away the good hair and, the child sex trafficking charges and the drug charges or allegations. Excuse me. And basically, from a political point of view, you just described most of the ultra-Orthodox parties, in Netanyahu’s coalition.

So they talk a big game, but they don’t really contribute to the solution financially or in terms of, people with boots. there’s another issue, of course, and the whirlwind export havoc. And there’s also a very short term issue. After the Hamas assault on Israel back in October, Netanyahu was able to convince most of the parties in parliament, to form a unity government, because the feeling was the attack had been on everyone.

So everyone should have a say in how things unfold. since then, Netanyahu has not shared power with unity government all that much. And so party after party has left, accusing Netanyahu of not having a plan for the war, accusing Netanyahu of prolonging the war for his own political purposes in order to solidify his position as prime minister.

and, accusing him and the ultra-Orthodox overall of just general strategic incompetence because this attack shouldn’t have happened. Hamas is like the one thing that the Israelis are watching every single day. It’s there shouldn’t have been no surprise attack. And here we are eight months later, and there’s no sign that the war is going to conclude.

And in a number of places where Israel has supposedly already cleansed the area of Hamas fighters, they’ve popped up again. So, the international condemnation from the point of view of people who have left the Israeli government is now for nothing, because the Israelis have basically paid the price of launching a major war and, being at least indirectly complicit, a lot of unpleasantness.

But there’s still no sign that the war’s end is in sight. that means that, that Yahoo really, really needs the Orthodox to hold onto power while other parties in Parliament are actively agitating for fresh elections. We only take one significant coalition partner in, in India, whose coalition to force new elections in which, I would probably not do very well.

And you had throw the Supreme Court today into that mix, and you’re undoubtedly going to have at least some or ultra-Orthodox who think they might get a better deal with a different government, as opposed to having to serve in the military or actually be actively involved in changing the law so that their own people have to serve in the military, since they’re sitting in the government right now, when the case has been made.

Anyway, so significant decision changes things on the domestic and the international fronts. And that’s all I’ve got. All right. I got to cross this.

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