The Biden administration has issued its first wave of investment bans on the Chinese tech space – things like AI or tech with military applications. However, money isn’t the problem for the Chinese; the real kicker is losing access to American know-how.
This is only the first wave of capital restrictions placed on the Chinese, but they won’t be hurting for cash. For the last 30 years, the Chinese have restricted capital from flowing abroad, ensuring a bottomless supply of money at home. That’s why China has seen explosive growth over the past few decades.
The one thing they do lack is ACCESS. Without the know-how and connections American investment gave them, all those doors will slam shut in their face. Innovation will be stifled, and economic growth will come to a halt.
This is only the first wave of capital restrictions placed on the Chinese, but the long-term effects will be devastating. And to kick Xi while he’s down, he’ll just have to sit back and watch the tech sectors of the countries around him surge to the top.
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.
Things over in Ukraine are in a bit of a holding period, which makes getting these updates out consistently that much harder…and let’s not forget that most of the data we’re seeing is shaky at best. But here’s what I got for you.
There are a few things of note. Ukraine is sending small waves of special forces across the Dnieper River to wreak havoc on that region. These small attacks have been pretty successful, thanks to the Russians shifting their focus to the east. This change in Russian strategy is an attempt to draw Ukrainian forces and attention away from hot spots like Zaporizhzhia.
The big thing here is that Ukraine doesn’t necessarily have to punch through all of Russia’s defenses. If they can push them back far enough to cut supply lines in the north and south, then Crimea could very well be a lost cause for the Russians. The Ukrainians have proven they are fully capable of consistently hitting a target – a.k.a the Kerch Bridge – so this is a genuine possibility.
Remember that shaky data coming out of Russia, well it doesn’t really make a difference for us. At the end of the day, Russia is completely hollowed out and no longer operates as a normal economy. They’ll never quite recover from this, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of Russia… it’s just the new status quo.
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.
If you’re thinking, “There’s no way China’s situation could possibly get worse,” you may need to talk to mother nature about the rains and typhoons causing flooding in northern China.
To understand the problem, we need to rewind about 2500 years. The Chinese crop of choice was and still is rice (although corn and wheat would have been quite productive given the Yellow River’s sediment makeup and the region’s arid climate). To produce rice, you must precisely control when and how much water is introduced throughout the growth cycle.
They needed extensive government oversight and the physical infrastructure to control the flows of a river as big as the Yellow. This meant that the Chinese needed to develop a dike system. Fast forward to the present day, and you’ll see a system of massive and unfinished dikes throughout northern China.
This dike system prevents the silt and sediment from the Yellow River from spreading and dispersing naturally, which means it has had over two millennia to build up. As the Yellow River takes on water from the extensive rains and seasonal typhoons, these dikes are being pushed to their limits.
I’m not saying they will break this year, but it’s only a matter of time before they do. When that happens, you can expect catastrophic flooding that will destroy critical infrastructure and many people. But hey, that still doesn’t top the list of things China should be worrying about.
Prefer to read the transcript of the video?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.
Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Golden Banner trail above Cannes Coral, which is a suburb of the Denver Metroplex. Today, we’re going to talk about water or specifically all the water that northern China has gotten of late, that heavy spring and summer rains. And they just got hit by a typhoon. And so there’s significant flooding through Beijing.
It’s already killed a few dozen people.
The key thing to remember about China is a lot of its government structures are a direct outcome of its geography. So the North China plain, where the Han ethnicity basically has its core of power, is a big, wide open area that is both drought and flood prone. The drought is normal climatic stuff. This is a semi-arid region, maybe roughly akin to a cooler version of Central Texas or maybe central Nebraska.
But instead of having kind of braided rivers that flow through it, it’s got one single mighty river, the yellow that originates significantly upstream. A couple thousand miles away that drains an absolutely massive watershed in an area that is soil type called the West, which is wind driven soils, very fine particulates. And that means with when this dry zone, a lot of it’s actually desert does get rain, most of it runs off, it carries a lot of silt with it.
And that’s why the Yellow River has its name. The salt is yellow by the time you get downstream to where everyone lives in the North China plain, it’s a raging torrent, but it’s a raging torrent with lots and lots and lots of sediment. Now, if you can capture that sentiment and kind of like the flood drive that you had in, say, Egypt or the American Midwest, you get incredibly productive farmland.
But that requires you growing things like corn, wheat and the rest. China’s rice country. Water management is very important. Rice has to have very specific watering conditions at every stage of its production. Otherwise, the crop is lost. Now, northern China, they don’t grow rice anymore. But after 2500 years of growing rice, that has set certain things into motion.
Specifically, they have to be able to control the river, otherwise the water will come or be not there at the time of its choosing, rather than the Chinese people’s choosing. And that requires a lot more organization at the state level, which tends to generate a stronger hand in terms of government and a requirement that you have everybody under a single house politically.
Otherwise, various factions will just attack the water works and destroy whatever the hostile power happens to be. Fast forward that 2500 years, wrestling the river into shape means basically building ginormous dikes down the entirety of its length for the entirety of civilized northern China. That means the silt has nowhere to go. So in the Midwest, one of the problems that we’ve seen after just 150 years of trying to do this strategy on the Mississippi is you get silt on the bottom of the riverbed.
That raises the level of water so that when one of those dikes does break, it floods an entire area. So a big thing that the Army Corps of Engineers have been doing over the last decade is leveling some of those dikes and turning some of the land to wetlands just to absorb the flood flows. This is at least two orders of magnitude more significant, the case of China, because you’re talking about the most dense human population footprint in the country.
And we’re going to rotate a little since you like this, so much so that shot over there or there. That is Red Rocks, Ampitheater. So if you ever want to see a good show in Denver, go there. I got a great view of downtown, the sunsets. Anyway, what this means now is that in China, you’ve got two and a half millennia of sediment.
And so every time there’s a flood, it threatens the entire dike system. And if you have a break somewhere, it’s much more big of a problem than you have in Mississippi, because after two and a half millennia of heavy sediment, the floor of the river, in many cases now above the ground level, surprising of the surrounding lands, meaning those dikes are two, maybe even three stories above the city’s.
And if they break the entire course of the river, you know, river goes by the path of least resistance crashes down into the populated zones. Now, that hasn’t happened this year. I’m not saying it’s going to. I’m saying that the Chinese really didn’t finish their dike system to the current level of absurdity until just about ten, 15 years ago.
They used to have floods regularly. They would kill hundreds of thousands of people. And in today’s environment, where the Chinese were facing every possible problem under the sun with their finance, their economy and their demographics, this is just one more thing you have to factor in, because when this breaks and physics tells us in time it will, they’re going to lose significant portions of some of their most advanced infrastructure, not to mention lots and lots and lots of people.
So whenever you see it raining West of Beijing, pay attention because it matters a very great deal. All right. Take care.
There’s finally a deal on the table between the US and Iran that everyone can live with…it even looks like Israel has given it the green light. So what does this deal actually look like?
On the surface, this deal looks like the US is getting back those American prisoners who were unjustly detained and releasing $6 billion of frozen Iranian funds. However, this isn’t just about a few people who got caught with dime bags; it’s about the broader relationship at hand.
We’re talking about Iran discontinuing funds being sent out to their militias, spinning down some of their enriched uranium, coming back under IAEA inspections, and in exchange, the US will enable them to sell crude abroad.
In no way is this a done deal, but some factors are helping to push this along. The big one is the Russian sanctions’ impact on Iranian crude exports and the overall financial situation, which makes the $6 billion offer sound pretty appealing.
We could be looking at the most productive stage of American-Iranian relations since the 70s; all it cost the US was $6 billion of someone else’s money. Sounds like a win to 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.
Before I answer the question about what news sources I use, we must understand how the hell our society became so damn uninformed…
Propaganda only works when you have an uninformed society, and if you haven’t looked up in a while, we can’t even agree on what color the sky is anymore. So yeah, propaganda is doing just fine here in the States. But how did we get here?
It all started with the fax machine, which began eliminating the staff that once served as ‘fact-checkers’ for stories before publication. Then email came along and only exacerbated this issue, doing away with any auxiliary staff. It isn’t so much that biases went unchecked (although that happened in spades), but instead that there were fewer eyes and brains to ensure the story was actually correct. The opportunity for the less scrupulous among us to make their version of the world known crept in. (The technical term is “lying”.) And…a lot of people like that. Cue the entrance of charismatic individuals who woo people with deliberate deception.
So if you believe the sky is neon green (or if you’re tired of hearing that it is), maybe check out one of the following news sources: Al Jazeera, France 24, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Straight Arrow News, or local stations. I’m not saying these are perfect, but they’ll get you going on a better path.
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.
The current Chinese system has been staring down the barrel of a number of serious challenges for quite a while now, and this new economic data just took the safety off that gun.
Between the demographic bomb that went off a few years ago and the lack of a post-COVID recovery, it’s no surprise that China is facing an economic funk. However, years and years of compressed economic damage are on the brink of bursting out and wreaking havoc on the entire Chinese system.
That’s right; we’re talking about deflation. This is only one month of data, so I don’t want to blow this up quite yet…but consumption has plummeted, there are ongoing trade wars, an oversupply of goods and undersupply of demand in both domestic and foreign markets, and that’s not even the whole picture.
We saw deflation take over Japan in the 90s, and it took them nearly 25 years to pull themselves out of it. The Japanese situation was leaps and bounds better than China’s current situation, so if this data is even partially indicative of China’s economic future, we could be looking at the beginning of the end.
Prefer to read the transcript of the video?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.
Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And the new news out of China is they’re facing a kind of a triple economic funk. For those of you who’ve been following China for a while, you know that they’ve never really recovered from COVID, whereas nearly every other country in the world, once the opening finally happened and the end of the epidemic was declared, we saw an explosion in consumption as people tried to get back to some version of their life, which generated a lot of inflation.
We’ve not seen that in China. Growth is actually lower now than it was over the course of the last two years when they were supposedly under complete lockdown. Consumption is down. Imports and exports both dropped in July compared to a year earlier by double digits. A percentage is normally the sort of stuff you only see out of a country like, say, Ukraine or Russia.
When a war starts and this is happening, when the Chinese are supposedly getting back to normal. Now, a lot has gone down since the opening chapters of COVID in China, which date back to the fourth quarter of 2019. But something to remember is that we saw a demographic bomb go off in China before COVID going back to as early as 2017.
The demographics really turned negative from 2017 to 2021. The birth rate dropped by about 40%. And even in the months before COVID, we saw new car sales, which are kind of a quintessential indication that your population is kind of up and coming and feels confident about its future and spent a lot of money going negative. And they’ve never really recovered.
So now after COVID, we’ve had all of these trends with four or five, six years behind them. And as they’re manifesting in a more normal environment, the numbers are really, really, really bad. Now, for folks who are not familiar with demographics, this is probably a little bit of news. For those of you who are familiar, not too much of a surprise, but the very, very short version is that most of the consumption of the modern system happens when you’re in your twenties or your thirties, when you’re buying cars and raising kids and building homes.
Well, because the one child policy Chinese don’t have much of a generation in that block at all. And since the one child policy is now over 40 years old, we’ve now had a full generation of people to not have kids. And that is manifesting in the data as well. Anyway, that’s kind of problem. One problem to her boy, deflation.
Now in the United States, in Europe, in most of the developing world where there’s India, Brazil, Indonesia, the rest, the opening of COVID was accompanied by a huge burst of inflation. People were trying to consume again to get back to some version of their normal lives. And over the last 2 to 3 years, their consumption patterns had changed.
Instead of buying cars or homes, they were buying computers and phones in order to adapt to the new reality. Well, now they’re shifting back and supply chains take about 18 months to catch up. Now, in the United States, it has been 18 months now since the last state to reopen California did so. And so we’re seeing inflation incrementally drop, as it has been for the last year.
This is broadly what you should expect. In China, things are going the opposite direction. The consumption boom never happened. So supply chains never had to adjust. What has happened is people are less confident in their futures. So the consuming less. And we’re seeing mounting trade wars out of Europe, Japan, the United States and increasingly secondary states like the Koreans are joining in.
And that means the Chinese have fewer places to send stuff to. So what’s happening is product that was normally produced for export from China is now being locked up within the Chinese system at the same time that the population is purchasing less. You have an oversupply of good of goods and under demand, both at home and abroad. With all those extra goods, prices go down and you get deflation.
Now, short bursts of deflation are no big deal. So I don’t want to overstate what’s happening here. It’s only one month of data at present, but this is what you would expect when you’re at the beginning of a deflationary spiral that’s caused by a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand, which is where we are going with globalization and the Chinese demographic trends, which are now well past the point of no return.
The last country to face a major deflation burst was Japan started in the late 1990s, lasted for 2025 years. You could argue that it might be over now because of their COVID reassertion of demand. That might be overoptimistic, but the issue is once those prices start to drop because of that mismatch between supply and demand, it’s devilishly hard to adjust because normally you would do one of two things.
Number one, you could reduce supply, but that means closing productive capacity, which means people lose their jobs, which means they spend less, which means that mismatch persists. Or you can increase demand, usually with government stimulus. This might not work in China and not just because of the huge demographic bomb that’s going off. The Chinese economic system isn’t really based on exports or consumption.
It’s based on invest mint. The idea that the state fosters mass borrowing in order to build industrial plant infrastructure in the rest that based on whose numbers you’re using, are somewhere between 40 and 70% of the entirety of the Chinese economy, and it’s generated the vast majority of economic growth going back 40 years. Well, you can only do that for so long.
Eventually. You don’t need any more bridges or any more factories. And I would argue the Chinese reached that point before COVID. And so, again, there’s been this three, four year lag between reality and the data. Finally manifesting. The point is, more spending probably isn’t going to help the marginal outcome. The amount of growth they get for every yuan spent has been dropping steadily for 40 years, and now it’s in far less than 1 to 1.
So it really doesn’t matter how much more fuel and how much cheap capital the Chinese pump into the system. It’s never going to generate more economic activity than what it cost to put it in the first place. This is what happened in Japan in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, they had reached the point where their economic model couldn’t run any longer.
They were getting basically negative income on their investments and they had then 20 to 25 years of deflation. The advantage that the Japanese had going into this is they already had a global supply chain, they already had global allies. They had an option for offshoring some of their manufacturing incrementally. They had strong demand out of the United States.
They had a good political relationship with the United States. And most of all, they were already rich. The average Chinese citizen today in inflation index terms, compared to the average Japanese citizen in the year 2000, has an income that something like a quarter or a fifth what it is in China. They’re getting old and they’re getting into a permanent recession and a deflationary spiral long before they got rich.
And this can end in any number of horrible ways. So, again, one month of data, I do not want to overplay this, but I’ve been watching for something like this for several years now. And in the post-COVID environment, we’re seeing the data belatedly match up with where demographics and geopolitical trends suggest that it should have been years ago.
If this proves to be the actual story, as opposed to a blip in the data, you’re going to see this get significantly worse in a relatively short period of time because we have years of compressed damage that is now bursting out all at once. And because the political system in China is basically down to one man cult of personality, the capacity of the Chinese state to come up with a creative solution is almost zero.
And even in Japan, where they were willing to talk about this publicly, it still took a generation to pull out of this. And alliances and the Chinese don’t have either. All right. That’s it for me. Take care.
Today’s video comes to you from the peak of Mount Evans.
Is the superconductor of every Green’s dreams finally here? I hate to burst your bubble, but the LK-99 is just too good to be true.
Despite their claims, these ‘new’ studies on LK-99 have largely been dismissed by the scientific community due to inconsistencies in the methodologies used. In reality, we haven’t gotten any closer to the superconductors we’ll need for the green transition to stick.
One of the big problems with green energy comes down to transmission. Once your solar panels or wind turbines generate all this power, you still need to get it to the people who will use it. If you can’t do that, then what’s the point?
While this might not be the answer to our superconductor needs, at least this topic will get some new eyes on it and much-needed attention. And who knows, maybe it will even kickstart policy reform…
Prefer to read the transcript of the video?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.
Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the peak of Mount Evans. Behind me is Mount Bear Start and Square Top. And behind that, Geneva and Silver and Decatur and treasurer and all the others. Today we’re in talk about something a lot of you have written in about, and that is the 99 superconductor information that has recently been leaked onto Twitter and Reddit.
The idea of a superconductor is it doesn’t lose any of its throughput regardless of distance. And if you can do that over long distances, you can transfer power from anywhere to anywhere relatively easily and cheaply. That’s the idea anyway. The short version for Elk 99 is that it’s probably nothing. The reports in question date back over 15 years, and the only thing that’s new is that they were leaked and they were put online and a number of institutions within Korea, because that’s where the first tests were done.
I’ve already come out and saying that at best they’re flawed, but none of them have ever been replicated, including by the team that did the original report. So there’s probably nothing here. It’s just that it’s getting a little bit of fresh air all of a sudden. Now, if you want to bet on semiconductors, I welcome you to to it.
It’s one of the materials science breakthroughs that we really need if we’re going to make the green transition stick. One of the problems we have with the green transition is that you can generate a lot of solar in the southwest and a lot of wind power in the Great Plains, but that’s not where most of the American population lives.
And even in the United States, where people only, only live, a couple thousand miles away from those zones, that’s much better than you’ve got in, say, Europe, where you’d have to basically go to the great Eurasian steppe for wind and into the Sahara for solar. So if you can solve the semiconductor and the transmission problem, great. There’s also another issue in the United States, because it’s hard to transmit power.
And, you know, very, very, very, very loose rule of thumb. If you transport power about 500 miles, it costs almost as much to do that transmission because of the loss as it does to generate the power in the first place. So you’re generally not going to send electricity very far. What that means is in the United States, most electrical concerns, all the utilities are local.
So each town or each county has their own. There are very few large utilities in the United States. And if you want to make solar and wind work at scale, you either need larger and larger and larger entities, or you need the ability to transfer power across jurisdictional lines, especially state and grid boundaries. Superconductors would, in theory, allow us to do that technically, but we still need the legal structure to do it.
Now you can do high voltage lines, which will double, triple, maybe even quadruple the distance. You can send power in an economically viable manner. But until you can cross those boundaries, it doesn’t really matter. So what we need now, even before we get superconductors, is a multiple acts of Congress to break down the legal jurisdictions to allow power to be sent long distances.
And as soon as Congress does that, a number of states will sue. Because right now this has been a local and a state legal prerogative. So we need a significant legal overhaul before we can really do the green transition, even if we did have superconductors. So I’d say start now and get the laws changed. And then hopefully we can have that physical science breakthrough that is necessary to do this at scale and over distance.
Today’s video comes to you from Bear Peak just above Boulder, CO.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) set Monday, Aug. 7, as the deadline for the Niger Coup plotters to step down and renounce power. That deadline has come and gone without any change, so what happens now?
This coup shouldn’t surprise anyone; just look at the African Sahel region, and you’ll see they are no strangers to coups. That’s been a harsh reality for the French operating in the area, and the coup in Niger only leaves a few options on the table…pack up and go home, send in some special forces to overthrow the government, or offer aid once the ECOWAS security clause kicks in (if it does at all).
This security clause dips into uncharted territory. Crossing borders has always been a big no-no in West Africa, but it might be time to rewrite some rules. And if anyone can do so, it would be the big dog of the region, Nigeria. And yes, the French would likely throw some aid into the mix.
ECOWAS will meet this Thursday to debate and discuss the coup in Niger. Their decisions and actions over the next few weeks will give us a glimpse of the next few decades in West Africa.
Prefer to read the transcript of the video?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.
Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Bear Peak, one of the flat irons above Boulder, Colorado. And the news today is that the deadline has passed for the major coup plotters to renounce power and allow civilians back in. Now, some quick background here. The French have been fighting their version of the war on terror in the African Sahel region, which is the zone between the tropics and the desert, the Sahara, for pretty much as long as the United States fight the global war on terror.
Obviously, they fought what was the war that was made some sense to them. So while the Americans were in Iraq and Afghanistan, the French have been moving around in the Sahel region. And just like with the United States, it didn’t go well. It hasn’t been going particularly well for the French either. The problem is that none of the geographies in question are particularly productive.
The Sahel does get more rainfall than the desert, but not a lot. So agriculture is difficult in a lot of these countries don’t even have a lot to mine. So you’ve got thin population density, maybe one or two population centers, and it’s really hard for those population centers to exercise the rich over the rest of the territory, ergo, where the French have come in to partner with the local governments.
The problem is those local governments aren’t stable. So the four big ones Niger, Mali, Gabon and Burkina Faso, all former French colonies have now all had coups. And as the first three happened in Guinea and Mali and Burkina Faso, the French have concentrated more and more of their efforts on Niger. And so now that Niger has had its coup as well, there’s not a lot to go for.
So we go one of three directions from here. Number one. The French suck it up. Realize that their influence in. Oh, well, they realize that their influence in the region is gone. And go home and deal with issues they can deal with. Which would probably mean sticking it to the country that has had the biggest influence with the coup plotters, which is Russia.
Option number two is the French go in hard and send some special forces in to knock over at least one of these governments. With Niger being the most likely one. And in that scenario, it honestly wouldn’t be too hard to do because the the coup government is just as unstable as what came before. And if you remember back to when we had the war in Libya, it turned out the locals couldn’t do the assault on Tripoli.
So the French, the Brits and the Americans each sent in a few dozen special forces and basically paved the way to the presidential palace for the resistance and easily overthrew Gaddafi. And then there’s option number three, which you kind of get an interest in, which gets us to the deadline that we saw today. There’s a group called Equal Was, which is the Economic Organization of West African States, which is trying to be an African version of the EU.
And, you know, we can find plenty of fault with how they’ve pulled it off. But they do have a security clause. And Equal was basically told the coup plotters that they needed to step down by today and they didn’t. So the question now is whether you is going to put its money where its mouth is. Now, the French get along very well with most of the countries, of course, and the one that matters the most, which is the most powerful one by far, is Nigeria.
And the Nigerian military is something like four times as powerful as the combined militaries of all four of the countries that have been taken over by coups. So if the Nigerians do choose to rouse themselves, especially with some French assistance, this could get very, very interesting, very, very quickly. And now that it was the deadline has passed and it was an equal watch deadline, not a French deadline, we will find out whether or not the Africans are capable of putting together a security force to cross borders by themselves.
Historically speaking, this was a big no no. One of the big contingents of African Union membership and African diplomacy overall was never, ever, ever, ever change the borders because that reeks of colonialism. But that policy may now be 60 years out of date, and it may very well be time for the regional heavyweight to do something different or for the French to do something similar.
Either way, we’re going to get some very instructive lessons on what is and is not going to fly in West Africa over the course of the next few weeks. So stay tuned. Take care.
Before we dive into today’s video, let me start by saying that if you want to defect somewhere…maybe don’t choose the same place as Travis King. Now let’s look at where things are with North Korea.
The history of North Korea is nothing short of a fever dream, and anyone who tells you they know what’s going on inside the country is most definitely lying.
Fast forward to today, and we still have very little insight into the inner workings of North Korea. Although, it appears that Kim Jung Un is “finding his own way” as the generations before him mysteriously die off or retire.
What does this mean for Travis King? We’ll just have to wait and see what this wildcard of a country decides to do.
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.
The Ukrainians and Russians had a hectic weekend, so let’s get caught up.
On Friday, the Ukrainians used a naval drone (a motorboat loaded with a crap ton of explosives) to hit a Russian vessel in the port of Novorossiysk. These naval drones have been successful so far; just look at the Kerch Strait Bridge. However, a naval drone hitting Novorossiysk would signal a considerable range increase OR that a third party is involved.
So how does this play into commercial shipping? On Saturday, the Ukrainians hit a Russian tanker with one of these drones. And if that marks the beginning of a trend, this will be a big problem for many people. As the Black Sea becomes a no-go zone, Russia’s global position will suffer because everything they do is dependent on free movement…if that goes up in smoke, everything does.
I’ve been surprised up to this point that not everything has gone up in smoke, but it’s looking like those days might be over. The “restraint” that we’ve seen from both sides has practically gone away overnight, and there will be huge whiplash effects. The oil industry, in particular, will face significant disruptions; most of that falling on China and the rest of East Asia.
A lot still needs to happen, but the Russians could be losing their strategic position in the water, their ability to penetrate global economies, and their ability to project power across the wider world…not to mention a complete reordering of international energy. So yeah, things are heating up.
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.
