Geopolitics of Terror Groups: ISIS and ISIS Khorasan

With the recent attack on Moscow, I received some requests to do a breakdown on the geopolitics of ISIS. First things first, there are two largely unaffiliated groups at play here – ISIS-Khorasan and the more widely known, ISIS.

The original ISIS (aka the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) primarily operates in the middle Fertile Crescent region. In recent years ISIS has not done well, losing control over all the territory it once controlled, being reduced to little more than a strategic nuisance.

ISIS-Khorasan has no specific region in which it operates, but rather targets Shia populations and engages in violent activities against secular governments it perceives as oppressing Muslims, such as Russia.

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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.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Frigid Colorado. We’re taking a entry from the Ask Peter System today in the aftermath of attacks by the Islamic State of Khorasan on Iran and more recently on Russia. I was requested to do a geopolitics of ISIS video. So here we go. Couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, ISIS’s and ISIS Khorasan are two very different groups. 

So I can do a geopolitics of ISIS. ISIS’s core power is in the middle Fertile Crescent between western Syria and central Iraq. So basically, you’ve got the Euphrates Valley that goes from the Persian Gulf up through central Iraq into western Iraq. Northern Iraq then comes back down to the cities of harm, Hama and Aleppo or Aleppo, excuse me. 

Well, that is the zone that technology and people and ideas and trade are percolated back and forth through a lot of human history, especially the earlier days. And in that zone, the thing to remember is that the crescent is very, very, very thin. While you do have Mesopotamia in the east, where the Tigris comes into play, in the zone between the rivers, it is a major agricultural zone. 

And while you do have more rainfall in extreme western Syria, when the Lebanon mountains merge with the the highlands that eventually become Anatolia in the middle, you only have the Euphrates. And even in modern days with industrial level technology, in many cases, the green belt where you can grow food in the central Euphrates region is only a few miles from north to south. 

And because of that, they’ve never been able to develop kind of the dense population centers because there’s never enough food production. And the zones that you can do something with are very, very skinny and very, very worn, which makes it very difficult to patrol it. So think about this this way. If your city was a half a mile wide but 20 miles long and the proportions are much worse for Iraq, if you were of your police station is getting all the way down and all the way back would be difficult. 

You want something that’s spread out from a central point like, you know, say, a Chicago or Houston or Dallas or most of our cities. It just makes a civilizational penetration much more difficult and eventually hit hard. Does it do anything? So this is the zone that ISIS’s from water is limited. There’s only one source aside from the oases, and either you control it or you don’t. 

And so geopolitics, that region tend to be very visceral and very desperate. And this is part of the reason why ISIS is so violent, because it is a battle for survival among groups every single day. Now, it also means that groups like ISIS are not long for this world. If you look at the region from a broader perspective, if you go further west, you hit the Levant, which has powers like Israel and the core of Syria to go north. 

You get into Anatolia and the Turkish territories, and if you go east, you get into Mesopotamia, which is have been a cradle of civilization for quite some time. This zone in the middle can’t do anything. And the zone in the middle has never been powerful enough to penetrate into any of those other three zones. So the only time this zone in the middle matters at all is when all three of those major areas are off light at the same time. 

And if you go back to ISIS’s heyday ten, 15 years ago, that’s exactly where we were. Syria was in a civil war that the central government had almost lost. Iraq was reeling from the effects of the American occupation, was not able to patrol its own territory, much less things on its fringes. And the Turks had not yet reemerged from their century long self-imposed geopolitical sleep. 

It was a very different situation. And so ISIS was able to form, recruit, expand, dominate groups and basically go on a series of small genocides. It was pretty nasty. Now, that’s not our situation. The Syrian government has, for the most part, stabilized. Even if the civil war is not quite over. The Turks are back in the game and are crossing the border regularly. 

And Iraq is a power worthy of its name again. And so ISIS is basically fallen from controlling territory to just a few outposts that move around and a general insurgency in some of the least valuable property in the Middle East. So that’s icis. ISIS Khorasan is different. ISIS chorus on things that ISIS’s a bunch of wimps because they don’t kill enough people, specifically Shia, ISIS’s primarily Sunni. 

I Scorsone as well. And they see Shia as the worst apostates of all and so they are not interested in holding territory. They are interested in taking the battle wherever it may go and wherever there’s a secular government. And so that has taken them against the Taliban, which they think are a bunch of horses. Let’s take it up against the Iranians who are Shia. 

And that’s taken them against the Russians, who they see as oppressing their fellow Sunni followers. Because of this, you can’t do a geopolitics of ISIS Khorasan because they’re not interested in territory. They don’t have a home territory. They’re actually fairly egalitarian as to who they take into their ranks as long as you’re not a Shia. And in the case of the Russian space, there are a lot of subjugated Muslim populations with probably the Uzbeks being the most important that are willing to join violent groups. 

And so one of the things that it appears to be with ISIS course on is they’ve been recruiting pretty aggressively from within the former Soviet sphere. Uzbeks, Tajiks, some Kyrgyz, maybe some to some Turkmen, and hopefully not, but most likely. So Dagestan is Chechens about Kurds and Tatars. Those are all people who live within the Russian Federation today. 

So the danger here for the Russians is very, very real from a security point of view, an analogy, a logical point of view. But you can’t do a geopolitics of ISIS’s or ICE’s Kurdistan because they don’t have a core territory. They’re a splinter group that’s based entirely on ideology. So ISIS is not the sort of group that can expand much beyond its current footprint and certainly not beyond that part of the Middle Euphrates, where from time to time they can kind of expand its course on as a different sort of category. 

They are not constrained and it could very well be coming to a place near you. That was way more inflammatory than he deserved. While there have been certainly plots interrupted by ISIS because American interest, there’s no sign that the uproar in the United States for that yet.

Things I (Do) Worry About: A Post-Germany Europe

Germany has had a streak hotter than the ’96 Chicago Bulls. The German economic model has contributed to European political, economic, and industrial success, but problems are on the horizon.

Germany’s industrial success can be attributed to three trends: a high value-added economy focusing on skilled labor, access to cheap energy and inputs from Russia, and a global trade system facilitated by the US. Now take away all three of those things, mix in an aging population, workforce shortages, and swath of geopolitical challenges, and you’re left with a very scary picture for the Germans (and Europe).

Germany’s role as the hub of multinational manufacturing means that collapse could send ripple effects across Central Europe, with political, economic and strategic implications.

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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.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the Pacific. Today we’re adding another entry into things that I do and do not worry about, and this one is one that I mostly do worry about, and that’s what happens to Europe, is the German economic model fails. Well, for those of you who don’t live and breathe things German, you basically have three reinforcing trends that have made Germany an industrial superpower, especially for the last 30 years. 

The first one is an extraordinarily high value added economy that is focused on the ultra skilled labor and precision. The problem with that is the German population is aging out and over the next decade they’re going to lose the bulk of that workforce and the retirees are going to start drawing in pensions in health care, instead of paying taxes and providing the capital that’s necessary to keep that high end manufacturing base working. 

So the entire base within the German system is breaking. In addition, number two, relatively cheap, relatively bottomless supplies of energies and inputs from the Russian system, not only those obviously been constrained by sanctions in the Ukraine war, but it was the Germans who did a whole lot of the work in places like Siberia and keeping that production flowing. 

And since the Germans stopped doing that because of the war, we now know that there’s going to be maintenance issues in the Russian system, even if there’s no war damage, even if the sanctions allow the stuff to flow. Now, that’s a little bit loosey goosey. We don’t know how long it’s going to take for this up to go off line, but we know it’s coming. 

And then the third issue is the United States. The Americans have provided warble cover to the world. So that anyone can ship anything anywhere. And the Germans use this before 1990 to ship product primarily to the United States. And more recently, they’ve been using it to ship to China. Well, that’s another country that is facing demographic issues. And there’s a competition between Joe Biden and Donald Trump over who can be more economically protectionist. 

So the entire model is in danger. But the real reason I worry about this is not for Germany per say, but Germany is the hub of a multinational manufacturing system, of which it may be the central and most important part, but it’s hardly the only one. German technology, German training, German infrastructure in German manufacturing supply chains are not contained within Germany. 

They are arguably the single biggest piece of the manufacturing systems in Belgium, in Austria, in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, and probably a close second in places like the Netherlands and Denmark. So as the German system fails, even if everyone else demographically is okay and they are not, you’re still looking at the broad scale failure for the entirety of the Central European manufacturing system, and that is going to have any number of rattle on effects politically, economically and strategic. 

Will Venezuela Invade Guyana for Oil?

I’ve gotten a handful of questions regarding Venezuela invading the South American state of Guyana due to economic challenges and oil discoveries. The short answer is that I’m not worried about this, but here’s three reasons why.

This would be a difficult trek for the Venezuelans given the lack of infrastructure connecting the two countries. Venezuela also lacks a functional military that would be able to carry out this invasion. Lastly, the oil production in Guyana is predominantly offshore, so a land-based invasion is just impractical if the goal is to seize someone else’s oil projects. This one’s a nonstarter.

So, unless Venezuela magically fixes all of their military shortcomings, there’s no real concern of an invasion of Guyana. And that means the US can forget about this area and focus on the bigger fish for now.

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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.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado, taking one from the Ask Peter List today. And is it do I worry about Venezuela invading the South American state of Guiana? For those of you unfamiliar with the backstory of Venezuela, until roughly 2000 was one of the world’s major oil producers kick it out somewhere between two and a half and four and a half million barrels a day based on the environment. 

Since then, a guy by the name of Hugo Chavez, who is a populist who is completely incapable of doing math, took over and ran the place for about 15 years before he died. And his successor, who was a poor quality bus driver, took over. No joke. And they’ve run the place into the ground. So total production now is no more than a million barrels per day. 

And even that’s a little touchy. And in fact, we’re probably going to see a new round of American sanctions go on it in a couple of weeks here, in which case even that low level is probably going to fall. And I can see a situation before the end of the decade where Venezuela actually becomes a net oil importer because of their inability to operate their own fields. 

So that’s the back story. Guyana is a another former colony or recent colony just to the east of the country with has a population of like three, even 3 million, just three. Anyway, they found oil offshore a few years ago. And so the American company, Exxon has been operating there ever since. And I think they’re supposed to add a million barrels per day this year. 

I’ll be back to you on that one. But it’s definitely over half a million barrels a day. It’s been the most promising new oil play in the world that is not in the U.S. shale patch. So the idea would be that Venezuela, to avoid a state collapse, which is a very real danger now, would pick up and move over to Guyana to take the oil and the income. 

No is the short version. I don’t worry about this. Three reasons. Number one, there is no infrastructure linking the two countries. The corner of northeastern Venezuela that abuts Guyana is full on jungle and there’s not even a single road of note. So the Venezuelans would have to use their Navy or the Air Force, and they don’t have either of those things. 

Which brings us to factor number two. They don’t really have an army either. When Chavez took over, the military was broadly opposed to him in the ongoing power struggle. And the way he solved that was by bribing the generals with the money that would have gone for equipment and training. Well, you asked for that over 20 years. You now have way too many generals in order to run the military and no functional military. 

So if the Venezuelan army was able to go get into one place, they would just kind of walk as a mob into the jungle and die. And any that did manage to cross over into Guyana could easily be defeated by the Marines at the U.S. embassy, all six of them. There’s just there’s not a military question here. And then the third issue is that I don’t think it’s going to happen because all of the oil production is offshore and Venezuela is in its heyday, even when it was well run, didn’t operate a single offshore project. 

So they would have to what, take over the country and rowboat out to the facilities, take them over, and then kindly ask Exxon to keep operating them, but to send all the income to Caracas. Yeah. No, not going to happen. So there’s no need for the U.S. to get involved here because there’s no danger whatsoever. Although I got to admit, it’d be hilarious to watch Venezuela try.

Apparently A Cessna and Elbow Grease Is All Ukraine Needs

The Ukrainians are getting creative and finding ways to launch longer-range attacks on Russian infrastructure. We’ve already seen strikes on pipeline nexuses and chemical complexes as deep as Samara and Tatarstan.

Attacks like these hold significant economic implications for the Russians, as any disruptions to these oil facilities could be devastating. The issue isn’t so much that Ukraine is poking holes in Russian air defense, but perhaps exposing that there…Isn’t any.

Attacks like these will likely prove to be a growing challenge for Russian security and economic stability as the conflict continues.

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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.

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TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado, got a fresh dusting overnight because, you know, April, it’s April 2nd in the news in the last 3 or 4 days is that the Ukrainians have demonstrated a significantly longer range for weapons systems launched from Ukraine proper. specifically, the Ukrainians have been able to hit targets with their new drones that are in the, locations of Samara and Tartus stand.

now, these are more important than a lot of these in pieces of infrastructure that Ukrainians have been hitting with their drone campaign recently. Samara is a major pipeline nexus where a lot of the crude that comes in from southwestern, Siberia gets processed or redirected to European or Black Sea markets. And Tatarstan is even deeper within the Russian Federation, in Siberia proper.

and it is also a major chemicals and refining complex. So the significance here is pretty, pretty strong. the issue is throughput. The Russians don’t have a lot of storage. The country’s really big, and the most of these systems were built in the imperial age under the Soviets. So they were designed to supply the empire. Well, now that, the empire has gone its own way, and most of the former Soviet republics and, former Soviet satellite states are getting their crude and natural gas from somewhere else.

The Russians are completely dependent now for income on getting this crude out to the wider world. That means getting to the black on the Baltic Sea, because they can’t really use the pipes to go into Germany anymore. So when you think of that, and then you look at notes like some are in tartar, stand, we have a problem.

Because if these are interrupted, especially Samara, which is a nexus, then the crude has nowhere to go. There’s not a backup system when these clusters get taken offline, for whatever reason, pressure builds up in the pipe. Back to the wellhead. Now, this could be worse. the facilities that are in southwestern Siberia, especially places like Tarter stand in Bucharest on it, doesn’t get so cold there in the winter that the well heads freeze.

But now that the Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to strike over 1000km from their border, it’s only a matter of time before they start aiming for targets that are north of Moscow instead of south of Moscow. And if those pipeline accesses go offline, then you’re talking about the well heads in northwestern Siberia actually freezing shut. And a lot of the stuff just goes offline forever because if the wellhead freezes shut, you have to drill it.

And you can only re drill in the Arctic summer. And that only lasts for about 3 or 4 months a year. So, that’s kind of piece one. Piece two is what’s going on in Totters on Thomaston because it is a combination of producing zone and chemical zone. A lot of these chemicals are what allows the Russian agricultural system to work.

 

And a lot of this stuff is exported to China. So what the Ukrainians are demonstrating is the capacity to identify targets that move up the value added chain, not just going after raw crude, not just going after refined product, but even downstream products, like chemicals manufacture. so the economic hit to the Russians from this continues to climb.

And now it’s really just an issue of whether or not the Russians have the capacity of getting meaningful air defense of the hundreds of facilities that they have across European and Western Siberia and Russia in order to stymie these attacks in the first place, because they’re clearly not moving fast enough on the front in order to disrupt these drones launching.

And this is a very, very cheap way to do it. These things cost more than, say, the Iranian Shi’ite drones. But you’re still talking about well, well, well, well under $1 million a pop. Whereas a refinery that handles 100,000 barrels a day is going to run, you know, $1 billion on a good day. So the disruption here is real.

It is getting bigger. And we’re getting to the point where it’s time to start thinking about what happens when Russian crude and materials processing goes offline in some form, because we’re only in the early days of this Ukrainian campaign. And now that they found a soft spot, you can guarantee they’re going to hit it over and over and over and over.

Quick addendum, there is very clear footage coming out of toddler son of a small passenger plane. Think of something like the size of a Cessna, maybe a little bit bigger, flying and ramming into, a munitions factory that builds drones for the Russian military. specifically the Shaheed type that have been causing the Ukrainians so many problems.

Now, it’s not so much the significance of this attack as attacking a factory floor with a 50 to 100 pound bomb. You know, let’s let’s call it huge, say 300 pounds, isn’t going to cause enough damage to really take anything off line. The issue is that it got there. It flew over 1000km through Russian airspace. that means one of two things.

Either number one, the Ukrainians now have kits that they can smuggle into Russia, modify a plane at an airfield within Russia and launch like that, which would be from an internal security point of view and a technical point of view, just a disaster for the Russians or the Russians have absolutely no anti-aircraft coverage in the core of the country, where most of the infrastructure is and most of the people live, no matter what the outcome here is, this is a disaster for the Russians, because there’s no doubt that the Ukrainians will be now be doing it at scale, because it’s clear the Russians can’t stop them.

How Tariffs and Drones Saved Ukrainian Agriculture

Ukrainian agricultural exports are finally having the boot lifted from their throats thanks to new tariffs on certain goods in the EU and Ukraine’s adoption of water based drones.

Exporting Ukrainian agricultural products has been no easy feat; between Russian bombardment, infrastructure attacks, and European interdictions on Ukrainian goods, there wasn’t much movement early on in the conflict. Between the proposed tariffs by the French and some recent success with water-based drones, Ukraine might finally be able to get some product out.

These new tarrifs will free up the markets for Ukraine’s primary revenue generating products, wheat and sunflower. The recent water-based drone attacks on Russian vessels have helped to reestablish the grain corridor through NATO territories, easing pressure further.

Although this is just a small victory for the Ukrainians, restoring their ability to earn through agricultural exports could help ease tensions across the board.

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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.

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TranscripT

Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. quick update on the trade and war situation in Europe, specifically Ukraine. it appears we have or they have solved the problem of getting Ukrainian agricultural goods to market. So the quick backdrop is that because of the Russian war, the Russians were bombing places like Odessa and interdicting ships on the Black Sea.

And by water is how the Ukrainians ship out. Well over 80% of their agricultural output, or at least before the war, it was, but nobody wanted to get hit by a Russian missile. So basically everyone got locked up in port and we had backlogs, throughout the entire system. the Ukrainians started to ship things by rail west into the European Union.

they couldn’t get nearly as much out at most one third of what they could do, based on product and some products, less than 10%. But every kilometer that the, Ukrainian stuff was in a rail car, was a kilometer of ton rails that the Europeans could not use. So the Romanians, the Hungarians, the Slovaks and the poles, the border states in particular, were getting cheesed off because their farmers were having a hard time getting their crops to market.

And so they would say, you could transit, but you can’t actually sell that here. Well, if you have to go all the way to Germany, that’s a lot of ton miles that were suddenly not available for everything else. So it wasn’t a very tenable such solution. So these countries may on the whole be very pro Ukraine, but they don’t want to destroy their own agricultural sectors to do it.

So two things have changed. First, the French, the French have gotten involved. Though the French are arguably among the most agriculturally protectionist countries in the world. and none of this stuff was coming to France, but, the French economy is roughly as large as all of the border states put together. And so when the French did decide to get involved, it had an impact at the European level very quickly.

And they were looking at some of the secondary products that were coming in, things like poultry and eggs and honey and corn and oats, and they’re like, okay, we produce all of these things, and now all these things aren’t necessarily making it to France. They are making it to Central Europe, which is depressing. Prices within the European Union.

So how about we do this? We do it. We give everyone in Europe the ability, put tariffs on the products that we care about. And in doing that, we then open up the ability for everything else, most notably wheat and sunflower, which are, the Ukrainians, big money makers. now everyone in the border states grows wheat, but by freeing up some categories, then things could go elsewhere and things could basically be shuffled around.

The French got happy, and it took some of the pressure off of everything else. That was part one. Part two is a Ukrainian military strategy using drones. they basically been refitting small jet boats and jet skis and going in force after Russian vessels, especially Russian landing vessels. well, in the last few days, they’ve taken out another two or at least heavily damaged another two, as long as as well as a spy ship that allows the Russians to identify where launch sites and radar sites are.

And what this has had the net effect of doing is clearing the entire western half of the Black Sea of Russian vessels, and forcing the Russians to fall all the way back to an over a cease, and maybe even even to offshore on the eastern side of the Black Sea, which ports most of the western half of the Black Sea, out of range of even Russian missiles.

So this is opened up a grain export corridor going down the western side of the Black Sea through NATO territory, specifically Romania and Bulgaria, Turkey, to the Turkish Straits and out to the Aegean and the wider world. You do that, you take pressure off those bulk commodities like sunflower and wheat. So I don’t mean to suggest that this is solved, and I don’t mean to suggest that everyone has gotten everything that they want.

But a lot of the pressures that we were seeing that were locking up the cargo shipments are now gone, or at least severely ameliorated. And all of a sudden, Ukraine again has its single largest line item export earner back. and that will help everyone, because the more that the Ukrainians can put their own money into the war, the less pressure there will be politically on everyone else.

Why I Don’t Care About the Fallen Bridge in Baltimore

At this point, we’ve all heard about the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsing in Baltimore on March 26. While it may seem like this should drastically impact American shipping, I’m really not worried about it…

Before this catastrophe, I was convinced that the Jones Act hadn’t done anything good for America. However, I can now say that the Jones Act has one redeeming quality – since cargo transport on American waterways has drastically fallen since the Jones Act was introduced, the fallout of this bridge collapse won’t be as bad as it could have been. That’s a positive, right?

In a world without the Jones Act, natural port systems like the Chesapeake Bay would be teeming with manufacturing and short-haul shipping. I’m not convinced the prevention of some immediate disruptions is worth utterly stifling economic growth, but hey, I’ll let the policymakers come to their own conclusions.

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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.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. several of you have written into the Ask Peter forum asking why I haven’t had anything to say about the falling of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore back on the 26th of March. the idea is, you know, this is controlling the mouth of the Chesapeake. And shouldn’t this be a big issue, considering how gung ho I am about water transport?

It’s about 1/12 the cost to move things by water that it takes to move them by truck. And so you would think that seeing an interruption in one of America’s greatest ports would be a problem. it should. It really should, but it’s not. So let me give you the backstory. first of all, the Chesapeake is the world’s greatest natural port system.

It has more miles of frontage that can be used for ports than any other part of the world, with the possible exception of the Texas coast. And even that’s a tight race. It’s in the Mid-Atlantic, so it’s the midpoint going north south on the American East coast. For the parts that are densely populated from roughly Atlanta all the way up to Boston.

And it has access to what used to be the national road through the Cumberland Gap, getting into the Ohio River Valley. So it should, should, should be a crossroads of the greatest manufacturing zone on the planet. it is not because of something called the Jones Act, which was a program passed in 1920 that was designed to keep jobs within the American system.

that says that any maritime vehicle, any ship, the transport, any goods, between any two American ports must be American built, owned, captained and crewed. And as a result of having that restriction on maritime transport, but not on truck transport or air transport or rail transport, people stopped using the river ways completely. And we’ve seen cargo on America’s waterways dropped by over 99% in the century since.

And so we’ve taken what is honestly the greatest natural gift that God could have possibly given to any culture and destroyed it. the United States has roughly 3000 miles of naturally navigable, interconnected waterways, and we hardly use them at all anymore. We certainly don’t use them with small ships. we should, should, should, should, should have thousands of tiny ships carrying a handful of containers here and there throughout the system, making our own multimodal manufacturing system that is the world’s most efficient.

Instead, we move half of our cargo by truck, which is the most expensive way to do it, which it shouldn’t work because we removed the cheapest way of doing it and then other stuff by rail. Well, because of this, our waterway networks, including the Chesapeake Bay, are barely used, and places like the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes system, which should be the busiest zones in the world, are barely used.

So we should have this rough pentagon of territory going from roughly Buffalo, New York, to Duluth, Minnesota, to Saint Louis, Missouri to Pittsburgh, and then with an arc going down to Baltimore that is the busiest section of waterways and the biggest manufacturing zone in the world. Instead, it’s the Rust Belt. there are many things that have caused the steel belt to become the Rust Belt, but I would argue that the Jones Act is the single biggest factor, because it raised the cost of transport among these systems and basically drove the business somewhere else.

So this should, the downing of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. This should be a really big deal. Instead, the only thing it does is interrupt a few cargo shipments coming in, container shipments, which can easily be rerouted to places like new Jersey or Savannah, as well as some internal, petroleum fuel distribution systems within the Chesapeake Bay itself so that these are non-issues.

But these are like minor rounding errors, considering how catastrophic of an event this should have been. if we had gone the other direction, we’d have an extra $10 trillion on the U.S. economy right now. Most of that in manufacturing, most of it in this zone. And then it would have been a very big deal. So I guess from a certain point of view, the Jones Act has saved us from problems by gutting our economic growth.

For the last century, the part of the United States that has suffered the most of those countries in the Midwest that border both the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley, so specifically Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, because these are the ones that should be at the heart of all of this, and they can’t participate in almost any of it.

Things I (Do) Worry About: Higher Education in the US

If mommy and daddy told you to go college and then you’d be set for life…you’re not alone. With traditional models pushing everyone towards white-collar jobs and university degrees, we’ve created a massive oversupply of finance bros and marketers, but left those blue-collar industries begging for some fresh meat.

As the US faces a demographic shift and shrinking population, the educational system is struggling to adapt to the changing demands. With a need for more blue-collar workers, higher education in the US is dropping the ball.

Employers are already seeing these worker shortages play out and are struggling to find a solution. As more and more graduates enter the workforce and struggle to land that ‘dream job’, those lucrative and accessible blue-collar fields might start poking holes in the higher education system in America.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a beach. A love, a good beach. Today we’re going to dip into one of the ask Peter questions and I’m going to drop that into our open ended series on things that I worry or don’t worry about. This is definitely something I do worry about. The question is, in this demographic shift that we’re experiencing as populations age and shrink, what do I think is the future of higher education in the United States? 

And the short version is it doesn’t look very good and things are going to have to change. So let me give you a little bit of backdrop and then we’ll talk about the concerns. When the baby boomers started entering the workforce in the late sixties. They discovered that their numbers were so many that they pushed down the cost of labor. 

This is one of the reasons why the baby boomers have a reputation for being very mobile, because they would move wherever there’s a job, they could get better pay. This is also one of the reasons why women tend to enter the workforce in this period, because they had to do so to make ends meet. But that only put more pressure on the labor market, which is why the baby boomers have the record for the highest divorce rate in our country’s history. 

Anyway, point is that from a financial point of view, life was kind of rough. So the belief back in the sixties, seventies, and especially early eighties was that if you wanted to get ahead, you didn’t want a blue collar job because that’s where all the baby boomers were. You wanted a white collar job where you didn’t have to be in a factory, you didn’t have to be in construction or farming where you could work in an office, being a doctor, be a lawyer or whatnot. 

And so the baby boomers ruthlessly pushed their children, the millennials, to go to university, get a four year degree, get a white collar job. And so now we have the opposite problem. We have an oversupply of white collar workers and not enough blue collar workers. So that’s the baseline. Now, we’ve got three things going on in the labor market, in the educational system right now, with China approaching its end, we need to massively expand the size of the industrial plant in this country, even if you ignore all the national security concerns. 

That means we need to expand industrial construction spending and do a lot more manufacturing. And almost all of those jobs are blue collar and we haven’t been training up enough people to fill them. So we’re already in a situation where you can get a six week welding or excuse me, electrical degree and earn more money in your first month than a white collar worker can after four years of college and five years in the workforce. 

That’s just where we are. Until such time as the educational system transforms to adjust to this new reality, and it’s only going to get more intense as we go. And so if you’re looking at a four year university that’s doing traditional things, especially in the liberal arts, we already have an oversupply of labor in that space. We are just desperate for blue collar workers. 

So that’s number one. Your traditional liberal arts colleges, especially the smaller ones, are not going to have nearly the level of demand that they used to. Two year universities that focus on white collar jobs, same thing to your universities that work on more technical skills. They’re going to be in very high demand. And in between you’ve got the legacy universities. 

You know, your Harvard’s, your University of Texas is who either have a very large endowment or a lot of notoriety or both and will always be able to attract folks. So that’s number one. Number two is numbers. The incoming generation is no longer the millennials. The older millennials turned 45 this year. They’re way out of college age now. 

The new kids on the BLOCK are Generation Z or the ZOOMERS, and they are the smallest generation we’ve ever had. So the number of potential students that university systems can attract is simply lower than it’s been at any time in recent American history. And that means we probably have about 15% fewer students that can potentially enroll than we had before. 

So the competition among universities is going to be fierce for them. And a lot of universities are simply not geared for the jobs of the next 15 years. That’s number two. Number three is candidate quality. The Zoomers are loners. They don’t like to be around other people. The idea of the social experience of university is not something like, Ooh, I can’t wait to do that. 

They want to code in a closet. And that’s a different sort of job experience and a different sort of educational experience. Now, it usually takes about five years for universities to meaningfully change their curriculum because, you know, students are going through a four year process right there. And if you’re talking about a state school, it can be as much as ten years because you first have to get it through a review. 

And oftentimes the state legislature likes to weigh in. And certainly tenured faculty does. So by the time we have retooled our educational system to deal with the influx of blue collar job demand that we’re now already seeing, we’re are going to be most of the way through this transition. And it’ll be time to switch again. So if you are an employer, you’re basically going to have to raise your own, bring in kids who are younger than you normally would train that up within the system in order to convince them that there is a job with a good paycheck doing interesting things that they want to do. 

And the more successful companies that I have seen have been engaging in that process aren’t starting in college or even high school, but middle school, to make sure that their community is part of their success story. 

A Conversation with The Times

Here’s my Frontline interview with Times Radio from last week. We discussed the war in Ukraine and global security, specifically looking at what could unfold in Russia due to this conflict.

“Putin is running out of time and allies as the west doubles down on shutting Russia out of the global economy and corruption erodes his military gains in Ukraine.”

You can find the full interview below…

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.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

More Than Hon Hon Hon: What Are the French Up to in Ukraine?

There’s been recent discussions by French President Macron regarding deploying French troops to Ukraine. Is this really going to happen and why would they do this?

Given France’s nationalist stance, stable demographics, and the evolving European landscape, this appears to be a feasible endeavor. The French stand to gain some insight to tech and new tactics, some resource regulation, and the obvious strategic positioning to support Ukrainian forces and the security interests of wider Europe.

Given the relative speed with which France can make decisions and implement them (when compared to the Germans), this is likely the emergence of the French as an assertive power in European strategic conversations. This move could shake up all of Europe, so I’ll be monitoring this situation as it continues to unfold.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado today. We’re going to kick around with the French are doing in Europe, specifically in Ukraine. You have French President Macron, who has been recently talking about sending French troops into Ukraine. And not only is this week broken the eyes on a broader strategic discussion. It bears the question of what the hell the French are thinking, how they fit into the alliance network, how this might play out.

And I got to say, in traditional French fashion, it’s it’s interesting. So the French have a reputation well earned, I might point out, for being rather narcissistic. They’re convinced that the world revolves around them. They they believe that oftentimes the Americans are just as much of a problem as the more legitimate strategic threats, because the Americans tend to take the lead in everything because they’re providing the men and the money and the intelligence and the satellite system and the transport, you know, other pesky things.

But the French have always, always, always been at the center of decision making in Europe, largely because they’ve had a relatively strategic position out on the western edge where they’re not being constantly hit from multiple directions so they can focus their forces when they want to, not the the degree of a naval power like Britain, of course, but for a land power, they punch pretty hard and it’s kind of hard to hit them back.

Now, what this means is that the French being on the far side of Western Europe are directly impacted by the day to day goings on of the Ukraine war. And even in the worst case scenario where Ukraine falls, they’re not in the next line of attack. That would be Poland and Germany and then the low countries before you would get to France.

So from a certain point of view, the French can take an almost American approach to this and take the very long view. And that’s been shaped by their political culture, their geography, their military system. You know, this is nothing new here. But why? Why, why, why, why would they be talking about sending troops? Well, we’ve got a few things going on that are making this more and more feasible.

Number one, the very nature of Europe needs to change. So the EU, as it was originally envisioned, was an economic and trading club, but everything that allowed it to work has basically broken down in the last few years. Number one, globalization is going away. So the Europeans are losing their ability to sell on the international market bit by bit.

France, being nationalist, never really got into that. So they don’t have anything to lose. Second demographics. Most of Europe is aging so rapidly that all of the major countries basically ceased functioning as modern economies. And 5 to 15 years. But not France. France actually has needless policies and so has a pretty high birth rate or complications that come from that.

But this is not a country whose economic models in danger. Third, if Europe as an entity is going to matter at all. It has to be able to stand up for its own security concerns. And we now know very clearly that the Russians are not going to stop unless they are stopped. That means France, despite being on the far western edge, can’t take a completely hands off approach.

You can take the long view, but it can’t do nothing. You put all this together and the French see, putting boots on the ground as you create is something to very seriously consider. Number one, there’s a lot of resources, especially in agriculture in Ukraine, getting that under the European EGIS so it can be regulated by European norms is something the French like, just as it is.

Number two, technology. Ukraine has become a background in a new type of warfare using mass drones in the hands of not just strategic decision makers, but everyday troops. And if you are France, you would rather understand that before it comes to your borders. So having folks there not just to train the Ukrainians, but to be trained by the Ukrainians makes a lot of sense.

Three, whatever the future of the European Union is going to be, it’s not going to be a major trading bloc. They no longer have the population to sustain that. It’s going to be based more on politics, security, culture and identity. Well, these are things that the French are much more comfortable with. And if you can bring Ukraine into that family, it makes the overall unity of the system much stronger and more coherent.

This isn’t like the old days when the French would oppose European Union expansion because they don’t want to have to subsidize anyone. Those days are over anyway. The European Union is losing the ability to do that as the Germans age out. There’s no one left to write the check except for the French, and they don’t want to. So they’d rather change the nature of the union itself.

And then finally, there’s a leadership issue here. A very short term leadership issue under German Chancellor Schulz. Germany is basically getting dragged into a lot of strategic positions. They’ve got a fractured government made of libertarian businessmen, Greens and social Democrats. And there’s very little that they agree on. And it’s really hard for them to change their mind on any policy or take a leadership position, because before Germany can act, the coalition has to come to an agreement.

So whether it’s been on subsidies or health care or labor negotiations or the Ukraine war or EU policy, everything has just been so damn slow. And then you have France, where there’s a majority government run by a major party under a relatively airmatic leader who can make decisions and implement them very quickly. And if you put that in the context of what’s going on Ukraine right now in this conversation of troops, people are looking to Germany to set the strategic conversation at all.

They’re looking to the French and may they may not like what the French have to say. But there’s a lot of different opinions, because if you are in Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania or Finland or Sweden or Poland, well, of course we’re going to have to get involved in Ukraine. Of course, the Russians are not going to stop.

Of course, we need to consider putting boots on the ground in order to protect the Ukrainians and look out for European values to have someone on the other side of Europe and far west saying that. That’s a rallying cry, not something to argue against. So for the first time in quite some time, the French are getting some very real strategic kudos from other European countries for being aggressive as opposed to just arguing with the United States.

And then there’s the final issue of what would they do when we get there. We’re not talking about French troops going to the frontline and fighting the Russians. No, no, this is not a Napoleonic invasion. The idea is threefold. Number one, you put them there in order to repair equipment that the Ukrainians need. So it doesn’t have to get shipped all the way to Western Europe.

So speed the process up. Number two, training it both ways. The French training the Ukrainians, especially things like Special forces, the Ukrainians training the French, and especially in things like drone tech. And then third, provide a strategic backstop in places that you don’t expect to get hot but could. So you put French troops on, say, the border of Belarus or the border of Moldova, where the Russians have forces in a place called Transnistria, where they’re basically sponsored a secessionist operation 30 years ago, and they’re still there.

And that way the Ukrainian forces that are there now can redirect to the front line. So there’s a lot of reasons that we should treat this seriously. I mean, yes, it’s the French, so there’s a lot of bombast and pomposity. But this is a very, very real strategic discussion that Macron has started. And if I was a betting man, I’d say it’s going to manifest as something that is actually real before the end of this year.

The New Face of Military Technology

The new face of military technology is here…and no its not some Master Chief type suit running around the battlefield. We’re talking about the democratization of tech applications and the empowerment of individual soldiers to make strategic decisions.

The best example of this is the use of drone technology in Ukraine. With accurate and timely striking capabilities at the fingertips of everyday soldiers, attacks can be carried out at the flip of a switch. We’re seeing this play out with strikes on Russian naval vessels, small drones used in anti-personnel attacks, mid-range infrastructure strikes, and modular drones like the Phoenix Ghost for precision attacks deep in Russian territory.

These drone technologies and other developments are playing a key role in disrupting Russian operations, and we’re beginning to see practical applications for use in future conflicts. The decentralization of precision targeting is shaping up to be a transformative force in contemporary conflicts.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey Everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. We’re in the calm between the snow storms. Got 40 inches last week. What we’re going to do this weekend is 4 to 6 inches on what seems like a rounding error in comparison. Anyway, 60 degrees because Colorado today, we’re talking about the revolution in military affairs. It is now going through a second phase.

So the first revolution of military affairs happened in the 1990s and 2000 when the United States started to marry information technologies to its military, its combination of sensors and targeting information, whether it’s on the method of delivering the ordnance or in satellite or attached to the weapon itself. So, for example, joint direct attack missions fall into that category, as do cruise missiles like the Tomahawk.

Important stuff. And it basically took whatever explosive ordnance that you had and allowed you to deliver to a target with a very high degree of accuracy. So instead of having the carpet bomb, things like we used to in Vietnam, in Egypt before. Now you just send one or two weapons out and hit the specific target that you’re at the Ross Hawk for a good long time.

But that if you marry precision weapons with hypersonics, that all of a sudden all of the rules of warfare go away and you can just have a handful of hypersonics to defend everything. And then we discovered things like jamming and the fact that people don’t have one tank, they have 100,000 people in infantry and the math never just worked out.

Hypersonics are just way too expensive sort of in order to play. It’s just that it’s not the determining role. So that was kind of phase one. We’re going through phase two now, which is the democratization of the application of these technologies. And so instead of it being controlled from the White House, we’re from a generals chair. Individual soldiers are now giving command of this sort of information, can use it to make targets on an autonomous basis.

And we’re seeing this, of course, most aggressively in Ukraine, mostly with drones. The Ukrainians are following a four part strategy at the moment. So this is going to evolve quite a bit. Phase one is applying these drone technologies to things like jet skis and loading them up with a couple hundred pounds of explosives and sending them out to target Russian naval vessels.

That process has been so effective, has I’ve noted it in earlier videos that basically the western half of the Black Sea is now completely no go for the Russian fleet. And most of the ships, especially the larger ones, simply can’t shoot back because anything that’s installed on the deck of the ship is designed to hit the horizon or higher and it can’t are angled down to target these small boats in the water.

So that’s number one. Number two is actually something that’s much more recent that has come up as a result of the problems with the American Congress getting conventional aid to Ukraine. The Ukrainians have had to find a way to hold the line against the Russians when they’re running out of artillery shells. And so that what they’ve started doing, this mass producing these very small drones that only have a payload of about a pound, which is about the size of a small grenade.

And when the Russians do their human wave tactics, you just send a swarm of them out to go after anything that moves. And it’s basically dropping grenades that range into massed infantry. They’ve done this to the point that in the Battle of Africa, which the Ukrainians technically lost, they were inflicting regularly eight and 10 to 1 casualty ratios on the Russians despite not having much artillery.

So anti-personnel. Number three is mid-range infrastructure strikes. The Ukrainians developed a pair of drones called the side and the beaver of the to the beaver is far more technologically competent and has a much longer range and better avionics, whereas the South has basically a grudge project that’s practically made out of plywood. It’s a fugly. Little thing carries a decent warhead, but less range.

And they’ve been sending these out against any pieces of infrastructure in kind of the mirror abroad, if you will, within a few hundred kilometers of the front line. And they’ve used it to target any number of things like refineries in the Russian space, but also fuel depots. And then finally, something where the Americans are getting in on the job with something called the Phenix Ghost.

Now, the Phenix ghost only carries a fairly small warhead, typically 5 to £15. The advantage of the Phenix Ghost is it’s modular and you can put it together on the fly and it’s light enough that one soldier can carry it. Now, originally, when the Phenix Ghost started coming in, they were going after armored vehicles and supply trucks. But the Ukrainians very, very quickly realized that because they were available in such small volume and because they were so accurate, because unlike a lot of drones, these have a live visual feedback to the controller.

They could basically put them in a backpack, send someone hiking or driving into Russia and a thousand miles from the front line, take it out, put it together and send it against an unprotected target. And most of the refinery attacks we have seen in Ukraine in recent weeks, in two weeks maybe are probably Ukrainian special forces operating with American made.

Phenix goes deep within the Russian interior. And this is getting pretty robust because at present, you know, we’re talking about regularly a half 1000000 to 1000000 barrels per day of Russian refining capacity is taken offline. The issue is that these things are accurate enough that they can strike within just a couple of feet of what came about because you can see where you’re going.

And that allows the operators to target the sensitive spots in a refinery like the distillation tower, where the parts that are really exploding get separated. And so if you target that, but the parts that are really exploding, it really exploding and repairing this is really difficult for the Russians because they stopped training engineers in large number over 30 years ago.

Anyway, bottom line is that you’re talking about interrupting an income flow for the Russians that is typically about 8% of government revenues, which is more than what, say, the U.S. federal government, as a percentage of the budget collects in terms of corporate taxes. So big line item. And if you destroy the ability of the Russians to process crude, that means there’s no place for the crude to go because the pipeline system has already filled the maximum.

And then you talk about pressure built in back of the pipes and then having problems, everything through their midstream right up to the point of production, and they might even have to shut some in. And since they don’t have the engineers to turn it back on, that would be that. Anyway. So we’re getting a combination of strategic warfare, naval warfare, infantry warfare, economic warfare that didn’t seem possible as little as three months ago.

And now they’re all very much in play with most of these drones, 100% Ukrainian born specials. Now, this, in my mind, evokes something very similar to what happened in the American Civil War and in the Crimean campaign of the 1850s, when you had Europeans engaging in early industrial warfare and then sending observers to watch the Americans duke it out where they were watching the Americans engage in early to mid industrial warfare.

There’s a lot of reasons for a lot of countries to now send observers into Ukraine, even if they’re not providing a lot of aid because this is a fundamentally new technological breakthrough. We understand today that the first phase of the revolution in military affairs took what was a relatively lumbering Cold War defense industry that the United States had and turn it into something with extreme range and extreme precision.

We’re now keeping that precision and marrying it to individual decision making with not tens, not hundreds, but tens of thousands of individuals with weapons platforms that can be launched in a relatively short period of time. And they’re decentralized. Now, there are pros and cons to that, but being able to have individual target enemy formations at scale over a thousand mile front and then hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the front, that is something we have never seen ever in any warfare in any age.

And we are only at the very beginning of understanding just how transformative that is going to be.