Turkey’s Presidential Elections: A Turning Point for Turkish Politics

Turkey’s presidential elections are upon us. President Erdogan has run the country for nearly 20 years, but his challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, hopes to shake things up. This could very well be a turning point for Turkish politics.

Once upon a time, Erdogan was well-liked in Turkey and beyond. He ran a tight ship, and his policies were solid. And then he fell into a spiral of narcissistic nationalism and everything went to s***. Needless to say, much of the country is ready for a change.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu is the top challenger but also comes with some baggage. Yes, he’s old. More importantly, he’s the head of a six-party coalition. Meaning at best, this is going to be a transitionary government. At least it’s a step in the right direction.

Probably.

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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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TRANSCIPT

Hey Everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from on the road. I’m traveling and I’m sick. So you’re not going to be getting a fancy backdrop on this one? We’re just stuck with the hotel room. Anyway, this video still needs to get out on May the 12th because we’ve got big things happening in the country of Turkey, which is one of the more important, more dynamic, more flexible countries that I see for the times ahead.

It’s one of the handful of countries that security forces and economy are basically right size to its neighborhood and ambitions. And I expect it to be one of the five countries moving forward for the next couple of decades to really dominate the human condition. If you want to see more about that, there’s a massive turkey chapter in my third book, this United Nations.

But for purposes of today, I want to talk about the elections that are in play, because we’re at a turning point in Turkish politics. The incumbent is a guy by the name of Erdogan who is basically run Turkey for the last 20 years. And his first decade, you know, he ran a tight ship economically. He was very inclusive.

He sought out broad coalitions and he even did some selective purges of the military to prevent the military from purging civilian governments like the Turkish government had done in four decades. And so overall, most folks in Turkey and beyond Turkey liked him quite a bit. But then he turned into kind of a narcissistic nationalism and started alienating everyone in the country beyond the country.

Also, his economic policies were great. His policies were wildly inflationary. He he was of the weird belief that if you drop interest rates to zero, that that will be counter inflationary as opposed to spurring demand and economic activity that maybe the economy can’t support. As a result, inflation in Turkey has gotten to levels that they haven’t seen in quite some time, and cost of living has really increased.

He also used this cheap money that was flowing into the system to support his political cronies, specifically in the construction sector, which generated something that looks a lot like the subprime boom in the United States, but like an order of magnitude bigger. And that bubble started to pop about three years ago. And so his political support has hemorrhaged away since.

Cronyism, of course, is not popular anywhere. But in the short term, the real issue is that we had a couple of really bad earthquakes in Turkey a few weeks ago, and Erdogan completely botched the recovery. Countries tried to provide aid and he basically said no because he thought they were spies. And since we had this massive construction boom, we now know that Erdogan had moved away from things like safety checks and, you know, sand in concrete in the regulatory structure in order to have his buddies make more money.

And so all of these things just flattened when the quake hit. On top of that turkey is a very young country demographically, and the bulk of its population is under age 30. And for most of the voters, you know, and under age 40, they’ve never known anyone but Erdogan. And so they are willing to move on. Now, his challenger is a guy by the name of let me see if I get this right.

Kilicdaroglu. Kilicdaroglu. Apologies for Mr. Kilicdaroglu if I completely bash that, I’m just going to call him by his first name. So Kemal has been in Turkish politics about as long as Joe Biden has been alive, which gives you an idea of how viable of a candidate he is in the long run. But he is the leader of a six party coalition who decided to put all of their differences aside in order to get Erdogan out.

And what that tells me is that even if he wins the presidency and even if the opposition can carry the parliament, and even if Erdogan goes quietly, none of these are given. I mean, we’re leaning our way, but they’re not given. Even if all of that happens, all of our hopes occur for these elections. It’s a six party coalition with a guy that’s older than dirt.

It’s going to be a transitional government, even in the best case scenario. So those people who are looking at Turkey from a foreign policy point of view, who are expecting big, radical changes, you know, you temper your enthusiasm. Now, I do expect there to be a significant shift, at least in tone, because everyone has become more and more erratic as he’s become more and more dictatorial.

And he’s now seen spies under every every precaution. So, you know, the Greeks are always an issue. The Armenians are always an issue. But because he’s a strong man, he’s kind of cozied up a little bit. I mean, that’s might be overly harsh, but cozying up a little bit to Vladimir Putin, I think the United States is trying to overthrow them.

He hates the Europeans with a passion and simply injecting a little bit more realism into would be perfectly blunt mediocrity into Turkish foreign policy making. To calm everything down would really be a good idea. But the biggest policy shifts we would probably see our number one, the Turks under a new government would probably lift their opposition to Sweden, join NATO.

I don’t want to said publicly that the only reason he’s holding up the the Swedish accession to NATO’s for personal reasons so he can win the election. So even if, you know, Erdogan walks away with this election again, we’re probably going to see Sweden and pretty soon. The second is relations with the Russians versus the Americans as regards the Ukraine war.

Turkey hasn’t done anything that’s technically illegal, but Turkish companies are serving as middlemen between the rest of the world and the Russians in order to get products into Russia that the Europeans have been trying to sanction. Now, the Europeans and the Americans aren’t happy with that. But until the Europeans or the Americans get a much broader sanction program, it’s nothing that the Turks are doing that’s illegal.

But getting a little bit more understanding from Ankara on what needs to be done in order to put Russia in a box is something that Kilicdaroglu Kemal seems to be amenable to in terms of other relations, really. Israel, Egypt or the big two? Erdogan Really? Butted heads with multiple Israeli governments and it’s only recently that things have started to warm and relations with Egypt are fraught.

Turkey is a former colonial power and Egypt was one of its provinces. Hell, for a while. Israel was one of its provinces. And if there is going to be some sort of new regional order in the eastern Mediterranean or the western parts of the Middle East, Israel and Egypt and Turkey are all going to be part of it.

And there was a time in the first decade of Erdogan’s rule when it looked like the old Cold War partnership with Israel could be resurrected in a partnership with Egypt, could be forged. But then Erdogan kind of went off the rails. And so simply letting history and regional geopolitics take the course. Turkey’s the natural leader of that bloc.

And since the Israelis were having some wackadoo political issues at home and Egypt has descended into full narcissistic dictatorship, it’s actually a really good opportunity for a more open and moderate Turkish government to make some some gains in this area. And really, that doesn’t take firm foreign policy making. It doesn’t take a strong leader. That just means taking advantage of the economic and proximity issues that make Turkey the logical power in this region.

Okay, so first round is this weekend. And if nobody gets 50%, we do a runoff. And that’s the same for the parliament and for the president. The runoff will be in a couple of weeks. So we’re going to know one way or another really quick how this is going to go. And as long as, you know, Kamal lives through the election process, it looks like he’s got a pretty good shot.

All right, you all take care.

Ukraine War Updates Part 3: What’s Next for Russia

When a country views a conflict as existential, putting a timeline on it is nearly impossible. So no matter how well (or bad) this Ukrainian counter-offensive plays out, we are only at the beginning of a long, drawn-out war.

For the Russians, war doesn’t stop in Ukraine; it stops once they have captured enough land or territory deemed critical to their survival. So we’re no longer talking about Kyiv or Crimea…we’re talking about Russia moving west and trying to occupy former strategic positions the Soviets held, like Warsaw.

So what does that mean for the Ukrainians? If they are going to stop the Russians from waging war again, not only do they need to take back all of their lands…they need to take the fight to the Russians.

No matter how the Ukraine War plays out, we are looking at an extreme breakdown of the security order. Either Russia emerges victorious, and a confrontation with NATO is in the cards – OR – Ukraine comes out on top and sends the Russian State down a path of disintegration.

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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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TRANSCIPT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here today. We’re doing part three of our Ukrainian Counteroffensive series. In blast sections, we explain why we going have to wait a little bit longer to get rid of the mud and how the Russians are going to go after the food supply, as well as the most likely, you know, smart plan that the Ukrainians are likely to fall.

Today, I think it’s worth underlining that even if the Ukrainians are wildly successful or horribly unsuccessful, we are really only at the beginning of a very long, drawn out military conflict here because for the Russians they see this conflict as existential and only a step one. The problem is that Russian territory is really poor and it’s flat and it’s open and it can’t support a very high population density.

So the only strategy that the Russians have ever discussed, heard in the last 400 years that allows them a degree of security is for them to expand out beyond the territories they hold to absorb ethnic group after ethnic group, of which the Ukrainians are only one of many, and eventually expand until they reach a series of geographic barriers that are not flat and open.

And in the case of Ukraine, that means the Caucasus Mountains and the Carpathians and the Baltic Sea, which means that Ukraine is not the end here. The Russians are going to go until they reach a geographical crustal defense that they can man with their rapidly declining demographic structure. And that means even if the Ukrainians fall to a man, even if they’re wiped out completely, the Russians are not done.

They will then come for Romania and Poland and Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania and probably Finland as well. So the Russians minimum victory is in the territories they hold now. It’s not holding up the Crimea. It isn’t Kyiv, it isn’t the vault, it’s Warsaw. And that’s a different sort of conflict that people have been preparing for at this point.

But for the Russians, that is the minimum that will give them what they need, a physical security. Now, what about the Ukrainians? Now, the Ukrainians say they’re going to liberate every inch of territory, which includes the entirety of Lugansk, Donetsk and the Crimea. Only that doesn’t make them any more secure. It gives them a little bit better strategic depth.

It gives them some of their industrial heartland and some of their coal and steel industry back. But at the end of the day, that doesn’t stop the Russians, because for the Russians, this is a battle for their existential survival. And even if they are ejected from Ukraine, they will not stop. They will rearm. They will rest. They will recruit, and they will make another attempt.

So if the Ukrainians are to prevent the Russians from actually waging war, if they’re going to stop this from happening again after they get the Donbas and Crimea, they then need to cross into Russia proper and then neutralize to specific urban areas that serve as logistical hubs. The first is Belgorod, which is just north of Kharkiv, which serves as the primary artery for transporting materiel, men and fuel into the northern aspects of the front.

If Belgorod could be neutralized, if the rail and the roads could be taken out of, the industrial infrastructure could be destroyed. If the fuel centers could be removed, then the Russians would have to proceed on foot on that front, and that is not a feasible option in an industrial war. The second one is much more complicated. It’s further to the southeast.

It’s called Rostov on Don. It’s a it’s a port city on the Don River. And it serves as the only logistical hub for supplying the entirety of the southern front. Not only can you get into Donetsk and Luhansk from there, that’s the only way you can get into the Crimea. It’s the other side of the bridge, if you will.

Now, if, if, if, if if the Ukrainians were to take the war to this point, there would be more going on here than simply preventing the Russians from launching another assault. It would also be about crippling Russia’s ability to maintain its own territorial coherence. Rostov on Don also serves as the primary logistical point to connect the greater Moscow region, where most Russians live south through road and rail to Rostov on Don, and then further south to the Caucasus, which is one of those all important barrier points that the Russians feel they must control.

And for those of you who have been asleep for the last 30 years, there’s an ethnic group there called the Chechens at the very end of that chain of Chechnya in Pakistan. If if if the Ukrainians were to succeed in neutralizing Rostov on Don, you can bet your ass that the Chechens going to launch a third rebellion. And this time the Russians wouldn’t be able to easily reinforce force or assault the Chechens, meaning that this time it would probably be successful, especially when you consider that the Ukrainians have already soaked up a lot of the military equipment and ammo that the Russians had stockpiled since 1945.

So what we’re looking at here one way or another, is an extreme breakdown of the security order. Either the Russians win, which means Ukraine ceases to exist and we’re in a direct nuclear confrontation between NATO’s in Russia or the Ukrainians win and neutralize Russia’s ability to control large chunks of its own territory, likely heralding the disintegration of the Russian state itself, which also has nuclear connotations.

So a lot of countries in the West have, in my opinion, been doing the right thing in the right order and almost even at the right speed in order to fight the Russians back. But I don’t think a lot of brain power has been dedicated to what happens the next day if one side actually wins this round. Now, luckily, even in the most outsized Ukrainian success this year, this is not a problem for 2023. 2024 however….

Ukraine War Updates Part 2: The Counter-Offensive

Ukraine has done all the prep work to launch its counter-offensive against the Russians. Now they just need Mother Nature to do her part and let the ground firm up. So, I would expect the tanks to roll out at the end of May or June.

Preliminary attacks by the Ukrainians have helped weaken the Russian’s ability to move. Since Russia typically fights by rail, these attacks have focused on rail nodes and connections. As Russian strategy pivots to trucks and vehicles, Ukraine targeting will shift to fuel depots and supply lines.

The Ukrainians have seen success by punching through the Russian front, cutting off supply lines, and forcing a rout. We will likely see a similar strategy used as the Ukrainians push into the Donbas and eventually out to the Sea of Azov.

If you’ve followed me for a while, much of this will sound like my predictions for a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the winter. As we’ve learned, the weather always wins and the Ukrainians are pretty sneaky…so these predictions should be taken with a grain of salt. What I’m looking to do is outline the logical next steps that Ukraine will take to win this war.

Yes, this map is from November. But given the largely static nature of the war, neither side has made significant gains since then.

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.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Bluebird Trail, which is just above Ken Castle in Colorado. You got the dry red rocks in the Lockheed Martin research facility down there below me. Looks really cool. After sunset, it’s lit up. Looks like a spaceship setting down in the rocks. Anyway, this is part two of our ongoing series on the coming Ukrainian counteroffensive. Expect to see that starting probably either in the last week of May or some time in June. Once the ground has firmed up enough that it’s not muddy in tanks can actually maneuver.

We’ve already seen the Ukrainians do a significant amount of prep in terms of preliminary attacks to hobble the Russians ability to move. Now, for those of you who’ve been following me for a while, you know that the Russian system, the military is designed to fight by rail. It does not do well with trucks. They don’t have very many and they’ve lost most of what they have. They prefer to put their troops and their equipment on rail lines, rail them as close as possible, and then throw everything like a giant fist at their foes. That has been a problem in this conflict so far, because the Ukrainians managed to take out the Kerch Strait Bridge, which was the only reliable rail connection into the Crimea.

And they’ve gone after a number of rail connections and nodes in the eastern sections of Ukraine, an area known as the Donbas, which takes up the two provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. And that has made it more difficult for the Russians as well, though not nearly as bad as Crimea. What they’ve been doing of late, what the Ukrainians have been doing of late is using a mix of missiles, drones and other air craft to target fuel depots and fuel trains.

And they’ve hit some very close to the border of Belarus in the north. They’ve hit some near Rostov on Don, some near over a season on the Black Sea and then, of course, in Crimea themselves, because trucks use a lot, lot, lot, lot more fuel to move the same amount of cargo compared to trains. So if the Ukrainians can hobble the Russians ability to move about the battlefield, then the Ukrainians can use superior movement.

And this has always been a war of movement for the Ukrainians. The Russians are slow but powerful. So Ukrainian strategy has been to move quick, punch through the lines, get behind them, partially encircle the Russians and then force a route where the Russians just leave everything behind. And that’s what they did in Kharkiv province in the summer offensive and in their fall offensive in Kherson.

The hope that the Ukrainians have is they’re going to be able to do that again with their spring offensive. And it really breaks down into two major pieces. The first is going to be a series of eastward thrusts into the Donbass to hit those other rail connections, to break up Russian formations in the Donbass so they can’t maneuver to assist one another, allowing the Ukrainians to dice them up and take their stuff.

You know, reasonable strategy has worked a couple of times already. But the second the bigger push is going to be going on the east side of the Dnieper River and then punching straight south through the province of Japanese. Easier in order to get to the Sea of Azov, which is an inlet off of the Black Sea. And if they can do that, they not only cut whatever remaining light rail connections that might be partially available to the Russians for logistics right now.

They also cut every single land connection and basically take the entirety of the southwestern part of the front and all of the Crimea peninsula and put it in a box. Because once the Ukrainians can get to the Sea of Azov, they’ll be able to take out the rest of the Kerch Bridge and then not even military trucks will be able to get in to resupply.

And then you’ll have the best forces that the Russians have completely trapped, completely devoid of reinforcements. The Navy will have to withdraw because the Ukrainians can then hit anywhere or any of the Crimean ports with missiles that they have. And the beautiful thing from the Ukrainian point of view is these attacks that they’ve already used to cross into Russia proper that uses Ukrainian gear, American gear at the moment is not allowed to be used on Russian territory.

So with every inch that the Ukrainians close towards the border, more and more of their own stuff can do deep strike into Russia proper. Now, if some of this the Donbass campaign, the separatist campaign sounds a little bit familiar, that’s because I mentioned this before. I thought there was going to be a winter counter attack. And so back in November, I basically released a video more or less lining up about half of what I just did right now.

Which brings me to why you shouldn’t take what I’m taking too seriously. Number one, whether wins and if we get a wet meh, then this attack is going to be pushed back not just to June, but maybe into July and even in August. And there might not be enough time to do it at scale anyway. Second, the Ukrainians have proven themselves very adept at fooling people into thinking what their actual intentions are.

So for example, the Kharkiv offensive last year, which was the biggest victory for the Ukrainians of the war so far, they didn’t advertise that at all. They made everybody think they were going after Kherson first, and that attack did happen, but it was really just designed to draw Russian troops away from where the Ukrainians really wanted to go.

And in the end, they ended up getting them both. So obviously the Russians get a vote in this. Obviously, the Ukrainians can decide where they go. What I’m outlining are the logical steps and things that ultimately Ukraine is going to have to do if it’s going to win this war. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to do it on my timeframe.

All right. That’s it for me. You all take care. See you tomorrow.

Ukraine War Updates Part 1: The Inevitables

The headlines of the week are all looking at the “Imminent Ukrainian Counterattack,” and while there are many reasons to expect action from both sides….let’s focus on the inevitables for today.

We’ve seen the Russians struggling to hit their targets thanks to upgrades to the Ukrainian defense capabilities. So we’ll likely see the Russians pivot from targeting power infrastructure to something new…

While not perfect, the Black Sea export initiative did have some successes. By the EU’s counting, some 23 mmt of grain—mostly corn and wheat—were exported, helping the Ukrainians clear the backlog of their bumper 2020/2021 harvest. But the good news ends there. Ukraine has lost at least 15% of its grain storage capacity to the war, and much of its sunflower-crushing facilities are either inaccessible due to occupation or loss of infrastructure or destroyed. This means Kyiv, when able, will likely have to focus on exporting bulk sunflower seeds rather than higher-value sunflower oil.

Unfortunately, the Black Sea grain export deal brokered by the UN and Turks expires May 18th and is unlikely to be revived anytime soon. Expect the Russians to switch their focus to agricultural infrastructure. Targets like this are much harder to defend, and this will likely mark the beginning of the end of any meaningful food exports coming out of Ukraine.

On the Ukrainian side, they have all the supplies and weaponry ready to launch a counter-offensive, but there’s still a few feet of mud keeping anything from happening. I wouldn’t expect a ton of action from either side this month, but it’s coming soon.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss the minimum victory cases for each side.

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.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeiha here coming to you from Colorado. It is the 9th of May and all talk is about the imminent attack…counterattack of the Ukrainians against Russian forces across the length and breadth of Ukraine. There are a lot of reasons to expect a lot of action, and we’re going to have to break this up into chunks today.

We’re going to do talk about the stuff that we know is inevitable. We’ve seen significant improvements in Ukrainian air defense to the point that over 90% of the missiles and drones that the Russians have been firing in have not been able to hit their targets, which is, you know, great if you are in Ukraine because they’ve been targeting the power grid.

However, once it becomes apparent that the Ukrainians are going to move and once it becomes apparent that the weather is warm enough that targeting the power sector isn’t going to kill any civilians in Ukraine, the Russians are going to switch their targets to facilities that are more difficult to defend, and that is the agricultural supply chain system. So on the 18th there is a a deal that lapses.

The Turks and the United Nations have brokered a deal between Ukraine and Russia that allows civilian bulk trade, shipping vessels to get into Ukrainian ports after being searched by the Russians, load up with Ukrainian corn, wheat, sunflower and other stuff, and they get re-inspected on their way out just to make sure that they’re not smuggling anything in such as, say, weapons.

The Russians have been warning for weeks, if not months, that they’re backing away from the deal and they’re definitely not going to be renewing it next week when it comes up for renewal because they need to switch targets sets. In the past, they’ve gone for the power grid because that’s how you kill people in Ukraine in the winter.

But once you get to summer, you have to starve them. And this is probably going to be the end of meaningful agricultural exports from Ukraine. They’re going to go for ships, going to go for port. The window for loading facilities are going to be for coal train systems. They’re going to go for silos and storage facilities. And of course, any place that builds or maintains agricultural equipment, this stuff is a lot more dispersed.

It’s a lot harder to defend. It’s not like just putting a bunch of air defense around a city and you to have a lot more target hits because of it. But that’s how this is going to go on the Ukrainian side. This doesn’t mean that you should expect an assault before the 18th. In fact, I really don’t think it’s going to happen this month.

And the problem is simply weather and not like abnormal weather, just how it normally is. The problem the Ukrainians face is that every phone, every spring, the country just gets deluged and the land is very flat and it doesn’t drain very well. So you get mud, not mud. That’s like three or four inches deep, but mud that can be 6 to 8 feet deep.

And until it dries out, you simply cannot move people, much less tanks unless they’re on a road. And if you have heavy equipment on a road, you’re just asking for it to get blown up. So while the Ukrainians appear to be nearly ready, they’ve brought in a lot of weaponry. All the battle tanks that nature was promised are there.

And they’ve even trained up on a few jets that have been donated. They can’t move yet. And so it’s probably going to be the last week of May or into June when things finally draw out. That’s just kind of traditionally when the spring mud season ends. So it’s coming. It’s close, but we’re not here yet. Now, in tomorrow’s session, we’re going to talk about what the goals are of the Ukrainian offensive.

But I’m going to warn you right now, the Ukrainians have done well because they have been unpredictable. And after that, we’ll start talking about minimum cases for victory for both sides. All right. That’s it for me. Talk to you guys tomorrow. Bye.

Chile Plans to Nationalize Its Lithium Industry

With the demand for lithium growing, Chile is making moves to nationalize its lithium industry. This isn’t just another money grab; it’s an effort to move up the value-add chain.

The Indonesians have seen noteworthy success with the reclamation of their nickel industry, and the Chileans are looking to take a page from the Indonesian playbook. One of the most significant changes will be the development of critical infrastructure in the Atacama Desert, where most of the Chilean lithium is found.

So who are the biggest winners and losers in all of this? China is really the only loser; much of its lithium ore supply will disappear and its processing infrastructure will sit idle. The Chileans are the biggest winners, but most countries transitioning to green energy will benefit from this. So maybe nationalism isn’t always bad…

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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.

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TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan coming to you from snowy Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about some of the changes in the lithium market that are going on because of the Chileans. Now, the Chileans are one of the world’s two largest producers, with Australia being the other one. And most of the lithium that Chile produces comes from basically brine. They dissolve a number of things that they mine in brine pools and then it becomes more concentrated. That concentrate is then shipped out. Well, the Chileans have now announced that they have plans in progress to nationalize the entire sector so that the state will have a majority share in every single holding. Now, in a lot of sectors, when countries, especially in Latin America, nationalize things, that’s a code word for I’m just going to steal this all and strip it of parts and melt it down and make as much money as I can and leave nothing behind. That’s not how the Chileans work.

The Chileans are looking to take control of more of the production process. Now, they have done this before with the copper market about 50 years ago. Instead of having international companies come in and mine all the copper, they went in and they nationalized it and took it over and ran it themselves. Now, nationalization is not expropriation. Nationalization means you pay the people on the other side a decent price for what you’re taking. And expropriation means you just take it and they get nothing. One of the problems the Chileans had 50 years ago is they discovered when they successfully took it over and ran all the mining themselves, they were dealing with the exact same companies internationally who would then buy the ore smelted in the metal and go on.

So while, yes, the Chileans did take control of their own mines and at least the base materials were still produced in Chile by national companies, they missed out on a lot of the important value add where the real money is and the reason the Chileans are thinking of doing that with lithium now, it’s not that they haven’t learned. Its that they’ve seen someone else do something that might actually work better.

A few years ago, the Indonesians, who were the world’s largest producers of nickel or banned the export of nickel, were not necessarily nationalized, but they forced the production of processed nickel within their own borders. So they, instead of necessarily taking everything from themselves, they forced industrial plant to be built in Indonesia in order to supply international markets. Nickel, like with lithium, is a very important product and anything that is going to involve mass electrification and EVs and batteries and all that good stuff, the trillions have made it very clear, very publicly that they’re taking their inspiration for this round of nationalizations from the Indonesians. So we’re going to see a lot of investment in industrial plants in the Chilean desert, the Atacama, where most of the stuff comes from, to turn the raw lithium, not just into concentrate but into lithium metal. And who knows, down the line, they may even get into battery production themselves, although that’s a problem for another five years or ten years from now.

Winners and losers. Now, the biggest winners, obviously, are the Chileans themselves. The process of turning raw lithium into concentrate and then onto metal is not particularly sophisticated, but it is a value added product and it’s something the Chileans have always been aiming for. I have no doubt that they can do it, especially if they get a little help from foreign investors.

The biggest losers are at the top of the list: The Chinese. The Chinese have spent a huge amount of effort in the last decade or two in building massive processing capacity for copper and for lithium in China and then just importing the raw product. And Chile has arguably been the biggest loser from that, while the Chileans are now taking some of that back. And if they have even moderate success with lithium, you can bet your ass they’re going to do the same thing for copper as well, which is going to leave all that industrial plant in China stranded without supplies. Now, if you’re like me and you think that China’s going down, or if you’re more traditional economic nationalists and you just don’t like the idea of trusting a genocidal dictatorship for your raw material supplies, this is actually a really good thing for most of the world, especially for the United States. We’ve known that we need to massively increase the industrial plant and especially the processing capacity for a lot of these green tech materials on a global basis because it’s too concentrated in China. Well, the Chileans are kickstarting that process for lithium, and I have no doubt that in a year or three, they’re probably going to do the same thing for copper. We need to see this happen in a lot more places.

So is nationalization a naughty word? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t benefit everyone, except the Chinese, over the long run.

Alright, that’s it for me.

The United States Dominates Signal Intelligence

We’ve poked holes in the US system and talked about Russian intelligence declining, so today, let’s look at what the US dominates: signal intelligence (SIGINT).

Next time you find yourself in the Netherlands, ask the local shopkeep how many languages he can speak…I bet it’s more than a few! On the flip side, if you head to the US, the answer is likely one…or two if you’re really lucky. That dichotomy summarizes America’s human intelligence (HUMINT) problem; a small recruiting pool requires lots of expensive training.

However, the US does excel on the SIGINT side of things. This is the monitoring, deciphering, and sifting of mass amounts of data (texts, emails, etc.) and tracing it back to the source. Then the human side of things identifies and extracts the most important stuff.

Since the US is such a significant world player, it’s become extremely good at this. But do they do it alone? No! The Americans partner with many allies, but four stand out: The UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. With the US, they form The Five Eyes Alliance  – a monitoring and sharing agreement that has given the US a good grasp on global signal intelligence.

Encryption has made this process a bit harder, but processing power and AI have helped the US lead the way in focused signal intelligence. This doesn’t mean that the Americans have abandoned HUMINT altogether; instead, SIGINT enhances and guides the strategy for the boots on the ground.

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.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Everybody. Peter Zine here coming to you from just above Denver. It’s almost May, which means it’s almost hiking season almost now yet. Anyway, I am going to talk a little bit about the other side of the intelligence question. So we poked a few holes in the American system. We’ve talked about the leaks. We’ve talked about how the Russians do theirs and why they’re good at and whether maybe not as good as they used to be.

But I want to talk about how the United States does things. Now, the United States is a country that, while it is firmly bilingual, all the population as a whole is not particularly multilingual. So, you know, you go to the Netherlands and you’re a random shopkeeper who’s going to speak like six languages fluently and then, you know, be able to command a half a dozen more.

Most Americans are luckily like me, if they can spell in English. And the truly fortunate among us are bilingual with Spanish. And that’s about it. And that makes a very small pool of people to draw from if you want to do large scale intelligence operations that have a human element to it. And so all of our intelligence programs include some very, very, very intensive language training because not just not a lot of people come into the space with that, especially when you consider that one of the big pools for intelligence personnel are former military personnel.

And if you are working for four or eight, you know, two or three whatever tours. Language competency in a foreign language isn’t necessarily all that common. Or maybe you have one. And since American foreign policy changes every few years based on who the rivalry of the moment happens to be, you know, we’re always having to recreate that language, that language competency, which means that when it comes to humans, we’re not that great.

In addition, the United States is a very rich country and convincing someone to go abroad and basically work in a danger zone for danger pay is a bit of a stretch, whereas if you’re in a poorer country or a country that has a lot more geopolitical strife, less written in its immediate environment. It’s an easier sell to the population.

So small pool, expensive pool. And that pool still requires extensive training. So the United States just doesn’t excel at human intelligence HUMINT. What we do excel, however, SIGINT or signals intelligence. And that’s the idea that you intercept electronic signals, whether it’s in the form of a phone call or an email or text message or a tweet. And you trace it back to its source and you monitor it, hopefully without the other side realizing that you’re doing and you just kind of get the raw feed coming in.

This is then processed with computers, which eliminates, you know, 99.9% of everything is noise. And then that last point, 1% approximately goes through a human filter where it’s sorted out two levels of importance, because the United States is the largest first world country and the largest economy in human history. And because electronic communications are now omnipresent. The U.S. has gotten really good at this.

There was a program that the Europeans hated. A few years ago, they called it Echelon, where basically the United States use that signals intelligence dragnet to cover all global communications. And while it was never as far reaching as the Europeans thought, it was still pretty cool because all you need is a radio tower to collect the information. And if you throw in global cell towers plus global satellites, that is a lot of collection potential.

Now, do we do it alone? The answer to that is a hard no. We cooperate with any number of allies, but there are four that are far more important than the others put together. The United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. And collectively, these form what are called the Five Eyes. They cooperate on the gathering of intelligence, the analysis of what comes in, and then they share the findings among themselves.

And that makes these four countries the tightest allies we have. Yes, we fight. That’s what family does. But it does mean that the United States has a grip, a really good grip on signals intelligence the world over. Now, there have been some issues that have come and gone through the years that have made this more or less effective.

The general obsession with the corruption that started a few years ago certainly has made it more problematic. But a I in processing power has almost kept track with that. So the United States is able to, once it identifies a person of interest, apply a lot of supercomputer time in order to crack whatever the encryption happens to be. That means that the dragnet of covering all of humanity is pretty much nonexistent anymore.

But focused signals intelligence is wildly effective, and it remains the United States number one source of intelligence information. That doesn’t mean we don’t do HUMINT. It doesn’t mean that human intelligence is not important to the United States. It’s critical, especially for any ongoing military operation. So when it comes to locating suspects, but signals intelligence tells us where to look in the first place.

And then those fewer, though, those more rare human intelligence assets are deployed once we have a general idea of what sort of neighborhood we’re looking at. Okay. That’s it for me. Until next time.

Russian Intelligence Capabilities in Decline

The Soviets once boasted the most intricate and prolific human intelligence network in the world, but things have taken a turn since the end of the Cold War. So why can’t Putin’s Russia keep pace with its predecessors?

If someone were tasked with designing the worst geographical region known to man, it would likely resemble the Soviet space. In a place like that, you must be able to conquer, convert, and control anyone in between you and the natural geographic barriers you need. So human intelligence wasn’t a nice-to-have; it was the only way to survive.

Once the Cold War ended, the Russians were left with the shell of a system; still operational but only a shadow of what it once was. Most with this specialized training moved into the private sector or more powerful government positions under Putin.

Now I’m never going to say that Russian Intelligence sucks, but it’s taken some blows that will require a long recovery. I’m mainly concerned about the misinformation-pushing-bots that litter the internet.

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.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Everybody. Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. Yes, this is later in the day that we got a foot of snow. It’s crazy. Anyway, I wanted to close out the series on Russian intelligence with why the Russians seem to be significantly weaker than we would have expected them to be, because, after all, this was one of the countries that arguably had the best human intelligence collection system in the world.

I think it’s worth first exploring why I say that the Russian geography is not like the American. So the United States has great coast, great waterways, great land. It’s easy to develop. It’s easy to expand. And so when we want to do human intelligence, you have to take somebody out of that environment and then put them in another one.

And since the United States is a very large country, even though we are multicultural, it’s not like we have a lot of experience in this is going to sound really horrible. Infiltrating and conquering other peoples. I mean. Yes, yes, yes. You can make the case for the Native Americans, you know, a century ago or more. But this isn’t something that’s kind of built into a society where as the Russian system is very, very different.

Moscow McAvoy originally was a relatively small chunk of land with not great capital generation or agricultural opportunities, and it had no natural barriers like the United States has with its border with Mexico or Canada, much less the rest of the world. And so they had to go out and conquer everyone that they border. And all that did was give them territory that they had to occupy and no borders that were decent.

So they went and conquered everyone around that group, too. And they kept expanding, expanding and expanding until they reached a series of geographic barriers like the Caucasus Mountains or the Baltic Sea that either halted their expansion or even better, provided a physical barrier for anyone else coming in and anyone who has been following me on Ukraine. You know, this is kind of my core reason why I think the Russians will never back down and why this war was always inevitable.

Anyway, this leaves the Russians with dozens of ethnicities that they have conquered and are literally using as cannon fodder. And since pretty much no one on the planet has grown up saying, Oh, I want to be cannon fodder later, you have to find a way to induce their cooperation. You can’t make them part of the leadership because they’re conquered people and you don’t want them going their own way.

So you basically shoot through the entire system with intelligence operatives. So the Russians, from the beginning, hundreds of years ago, have become experts at planting their people in other populations that may be hostile to Russian interests and collecting information and recruiting dissidents and basically turning the population against one another. And in doing that, they built up a skill set that dealt that served them very well in the Soviet period.

And the Soviets basically dusted off the Russian strategy and applied it to the world writ large, not just to the Soviet bloc countries or their occupied territories or folks within the Soviet Union itself. And that meant that by the time we got to 1989, the Soviet system had the richest human intelligence gathering network in human history. But then the Soviet system collapsed and just as everything else got weaker.

Same thing here. If you don’t pay your spies, they probably weren’t going to spy as well. There was also a problem with leadership, especially after the year 2000. There was also a big problem with the numbers that they had. So a lot of intelligence operatives after the Cold War ended went into business for themselves and got into drug running and worked for cartel cells and were for people smuggling or worked with the Taliban.

They basically forswear king country or czar in country and went into business and used their skill set for criminal enterprises. And they continued to be a problem today. Second, more importantly is that Putin drew a lot of his support from people who were part of the HUMINT network, specifically on the training and the leadership side, and brought them into his coalition to run the government after he became president in 2000.

Well, most of these people, like, you know, this is a wonderful opportunity to get rich. And so they got out of the business of manning the intel networks and got into the business of government. And these are the silver arcs, if you’re familiar with that term. The siloviki are the strong men, the military intelligence folks who run the system.

The oligarchs are the people who run business in the silver arcs of the people who have a foot in both worlds. Probably the most famous Eric is a guy by the name of Igor Sechin, who runs Rosneft, which is Russia’s national oil monopoly. Anyway, so the Russians have lost most of their operatives abroad because they stopped paying them in the nineties and they’ve lost most of their traders at home because they went into the business of government with Putin.

And that has left a bit of a shell of a system. Now they’re still good because that system to train these people still exist to a degree, but it had to become a lot more focused and they became very sensitive. The Russians became very sensitive to losing their operatives. They try to use them in places where they could have cover, that it was as dense as possible.

And as a rule, no matter what country you’re in, the most reliable cover for an operative is to say they’re a diplomat because that gives them an excuse to be in the country with a limited visa overwatch. They have diplomatic immunity. So if they get caught doing something and get sent home, you just send them to another country.

Well, that had worked for the Russians for a while until the Ukraine were started in. The Europeans decided to belly up to the bar and actually start looking after some of their own security interests. And so far in the war, well over 400, probably close to 500 now intelligent operatives who were registered as diplomats have been ejected. And the Europeans, rather than just sending them home and calling the day, have shared the identities of each and every one of them with every other country in the world.

So the Russians can never to deploy those operatives ever again in any sort of clandestine role with official government cover. And that means that the Russians have to reinvent a lot of their intelligence apparatus, give you an idea of the scale that the United States had to recreate its intelligence apparatus after 911 because we had the information. But we can process it fast enough.

20 years on, we’re still figuring out how to do that. This is not something that’s going to be shaped out by the time that this war is over. This is something that is going to be dogging the Russians for at least a decade. And that leaves me with one final point. There is another class of assets, deep cover assets, sometimes called the legal, sometimes called plants, where the people are assigned to go to another country, establish a false identity and live that false identity until such time as they’re called into action.

This is really the stuff of spy novels, but it does exist. And the Russians historically have been pretty good at it. What we have seen in the last year is at least a dozen instances of these plants, these illegals, these deep covert agents being unmasked, because as the Russians have realized, they can’t train at the same rate that they used to and they lost their entire diplomatic corps access to intelligence.

They’re having to rely on their deep plants to do basic intelligence gathering. And that is not a skill that these people are. Well suited to. For one, you know, these are years, if not decades of investment in time. And they’re being asked to do basic intelligence gathering and HUMINT collection. Well, that’s like using a maserati to deliver newspapers.

I mean, yes, it’ll work, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to imagine something going wrong. And that has now gone wrong with a number of these agents. So I’m never going to say that Russian intelligence sucks, but why has it taken a series of structural body blows that are going to be very, very difficult and time consuming to recover from?

And in the meantime, anyone who’s looking to resist Russian influence, it’s gotten pretty simple. You just have to worry about the bot farm. Right now. Russian misinformation is still coming screaming into the system, but it’s no longer. What’s the word I’m looking for. It’s no longer part of a multi vectored approach. It’s really the only leg the Russians have to stand on.

And at some point I think it’s pretty safe to say that one of the major governments of the world was going to do something about the bot form, and then the Russians are going to have to come up with everything else from scratch. All right. That’s it for me to you all. Take care.

Top Secret Pentagon Documents Leaked by a 21-Year-Old

What happens when you give a 21-year-old access to TOP SECRET documents? They end up leaking those documents on a gaming chat platform…shocking.

Most of the information that was leaked pertains to the Ukraine War and how the U.S. has low confidence in the reports coming out of Ukraine. Nothing too far-fetched, but that doesn’t mean we should take everything in the public domain at face value. Let’s remember who is blasting this info around and how easy it is to tamper with.

Russia once boasted the largest human intelligence arm, but we haven’t seen much Russian interference since Snowden. This means they’ve gotten really good, or that capability has lapsed, and I lean toward the latter.

As the US faces another leak, the real question that must be asked is whether people like Snowden, Manning, and Teixeira should even have access to this stuff.

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.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado where spring has sprung and the frogs are chirping, which means, of course, later today we’re supposed to get a foot of snow. Anyway, I thought it would be worth me commenting on the recent intelligence leaks by airmen Teixeira. Let’s deal with the contents of what was leaked and then we can talk about espionage and leaks in general.

So most of the documents that were leaked relate to the war in Ukraine in some way and involve internal U.S. assessments of how the war is going and how the Ukrainians are doing. And they’re broadly less than fully complementary. Basic indication from the leak is that the Ukrainians have been suffering higher casualties than are reported and more importantly, that the confidence in the numbers provided by the Ukrainians is very low. So the U.S. really doesn’t have a good view. In addition, there’s concern that by engaging in a static defense in places like Bakhmut, the Ukrainians are losing their combat firepower, which is going to make it more difficult for them to launch future offensives. There’s nothing about either of those assessments that is particularly controversial. But before you say that everything that is now out there in the public domain is true, keep in mind that it has been the Russians now that have publicized this stuff far and wide, and they have undoubtedly changed a lot of the details in order to make their propaganda machine a little bit stronger than it otherwise would be.

But three things to come from this. First of all. Teixeira, the guy who did the leak – the U.S. airman – from all appearances, was not recruited by the Russians. And that’s something that’s kind of had me curious for a while now. Not since Edward Snowden in 2013 have we had any of our leakers have a very firm and obvious Russian connection. Snowden apologists, of course, are going to reject that out of hand. But, you know, screw them. The Russians used to maintain the world’s best human intelligence arm. And in the last decade, either they’ve gotten so good that no one has detected them functionally working really anywhere, or that capacity has languished along with everything else that we’ve seen in the Russian state services of late, whether it’s the military or their cyber capabilities or anything else. That’s probably really good news. Second, Teixeira himself and why people do things like this, it’s really an issue of foreign recruitment. Even if they’re not a foreigner involved. People are often motivated by the same factors, with the big three being ego, ideology and sex. And in the case of Teixeira, it looks like it was probably a combination of all three. He was on a gamer’s forum. He had these documents. He had access to these documents. He brought them home. He photocopied them. He took PDF photos of them, and then he published them on the gamers platform, Discord, like the whiny bitch he is.

In the case of a couple of previous big leaks, I’m thinking here of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Ideology was certainly part of it for Manning in terms of Edward Snowden clearly was paid by the Russians, clearly fled to Russia, clearly married a trophy bride as soon as he got there. So, you know, I’m sure it’s for love, but let’s be a little bit more honest here. And then ideology, of course, intertwines with Snowden as well. I think the criticism here, if there is one, is we’ve now had three leaks of significance in the last 13 years that get into the files that are top secret and above. And if you look at the three specific cases of Snowden, Manning and Teixeira, they all have something in common. They probably should have never had access to these documents in the first place. Snowden was a part time contractor, and yes, he was definitely a spy. And yes, he definitely hacked into the system. But somebody at his level should have never been near a terminal, and given access in the first place. Manning was a private at the time and definitely should have not had access to the high end stuff. And Teixeira was a 21 year old airman. Now I am not the sort of person who’s going to go in and pick apart American security policy when it comes to information. But there is a pattern here and probably something that should be addressed in the not too distant future. But the biggest bit of encouragement I had is how fast Teixeira was caught. I mean, it really only took a few days for the FBI to find them. At the same time, a bunch of independent journalists found him and then publicized his information. So at least on time, on target, we are getting better from the law enforcement side of this. But maybe we should work a little bit more in information security on the personnel side.

Okay. I think that’s it for me. Take care.

Where Are All the Russian Hackers?

Today’s video was recorded in Wānaka, New Zealand, during my yearly backpacking trip.

Since the onset of the Ukraine War, everyone’s been checking under their bed and looking in their closet for the boogeyman – a.k.a Russian Hackers – but they haven’t been there.

There are a few reasons why Russian cybercrime has been lying low. The Russians have been hitting NATO countries with cyber attacks for the past few years. Places like Estonia have learned a thing or two, enabling other NATO members to build robust cyber defenses over the past few years.

Additionally, much of Russian cybercrime is carried out by private crime syndicates, which makes going on the offense a bit easier. Unofficially, of course, the US was able to drop the hammer on many of these organizations, which limited their capabilities heading into the war.

I’m not saying everything is hunky dory, but we’re starting to see the true power of some offensive cyber tactics now on the table.

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.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

Economic Growth Is Collapsing Around the World

stockmarket candlesticks in the background

When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) releases its least optimistic report in the last 50 years, alarm bells should go off for everyone. IMF’s projected global economic growth for the next year is 2.8%, and for the next five years is only 3%. The scariest part is that these numbers are likely overly optimistic.

No matter where you live in the world, this stagnation of economic growth will hit you, from the rich world to the developing world, and even the country that has had the highest growth rates for years – China. There might be a few isolated pockets of growth seen in areas that are nearshoring or friendshoring, but this will just exasperate the economic collapse of other places as industry pulls out.

We are looking at the unwinding of the globalized world from a geographic and demographic POV. In a situation like this, low economic growth rates will always be the result.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

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TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Hello, from snowbound Colorado where it was 60 degrees yesterday will be 60 degrees tomorrow. The news of the last couple of weeks on the economic front has been from the International Monetary Fund, which is that big international lender that helps countries get out of trouble. They are arguably the best in the world when it comes to doing economic forecasts. And the most recent forecast is the least optimistic one they’ve had in the last 50 years. Specifically, they think that growth next year, on average for the world is going to be 2.8% and for the next five years, only 3%. And honestly, they’re probably being significantly over optimistic. So let me kind of give you it from three points of view.

So first of all, from the developed point of view, the rich world, the rich world, most economic activity comes in the form of private consumption. You run on your credit card, buying a house, going to college, raising kids, buying a home, all that good stuff. Problem is that most of that activity is done by people under age 50 and with mass urbanization starting in most places around 1940, 1950. We’ve seen lower and lower and lower birthrates throughout the rich world. There is no country that is an exception to that and in many cases, replacement population growth, which would be like a 2.1 children per woman. You know, most of the advance will drop below that rate over 50 years ago. Well, you fast forward 50 years and it’s not that you’re running out of children. That happened a long time ago. You’re now running out of working age adults. Specifically, the baby boomers were the last very large generation born in most countries. And on average, the baby boomers entered retirement last calendar year. So the rich world in most cases will never, ever be capable of generating the economic growth they have in the past. And in fact, it’s probably a little worse than that, because when you stop having kids, people still get older. And so when you have a lot of 30 somethings, but not a lot of ten year olds, those 30 somethings are spending money on themselves, on cars and condos as opposed to diapers. And that’s sort of economic growth, is a lot more has a lot more octane to it. And that’s what we’ve seen in, say, Europe in the 1990s and 2000s. Well, they’re never going back to that. They can never go back to that, but statistically impossible. Okay. So secularly lower growth rates in the rich world, it’s pretty much going to be the norm for at least the next 40 years.

Second, the developing world. Now, the key thing that separates the rich world from the developing world is that the developing world isn’t as rich, you know, pretty self-explanatory there. And they need a lot of capital in order to develop their systems. The rich world is the rich world because they have favorable geographies and it’s been easy for them to trade with the world, trade with one another and build infrastructure because things are relatively flat and open and rain falls from the sky to grow crops, all that good stuff. Most of the developing world lacks one or more or all of those characteristics. And so if you want to develop, you have to have the cash come in from somewhere else and that somewhere else has traditionally been the rich world. That money is no longer available, and even if it was, it would be going to pay for pensions and health care for an incredibly large and increasingly size retired class of people. So the developing world doesn’t have the money that it needs to build infrastructure or to develop consumer markets. So without that input, the most important input for the developing world. You are looking at a secular stagnation that will last until that capital can be generated somewhere else. So not only is the rich world looking at lower growth rates for at least the next generation, so is the developing world.

And then, of course, there’s China. Now, the Chinese, as you know, tend to lie about all their statistics, but they have managed to sustain growth rates above that of the rest of the world for some time now. In the rich world, typically 2% is considered kind of middle of the road. In the developing world, it’s usually in the 4 to 7% range. And for most of the last 40 years, the Chinese have been above 8%. And even if you consider that you can’t trust all of their data, they’ve certainly been on the high end of the poorer side of the world in terms of growth rates. And now they’re thinking that, you know, 4% may be as good as it’s going to get. In many ways, what the Chinese are dealing with is the worst of all worlds. Like the developed world they are facing a demographic bomb, that’s actually a much steeper decline than any other country in the world. This is a country that absolutely is going to get old before it gets rich and reach its first world living standards. So this type of consumption led growth that we’re used to seeing can’t happen. And the export growth that they use to sell products to the rest of the world can’t happen because that requires growth elsewhere. Second, the Chinese have followed the developing world paradigm to a certain degree in throwing a lot of cash at projects, especially infrastructure, to make it work. Well China already has a great infrastructure now, and as the Japanese discovered in the 90s and the 2000s, if you already have a good infrastructure and you build more infrastructure, you don’t get more economic growth except for from, you know, the development of that infrastructure itself. It doesn’t do much follow on because there’s no need for it. Well, the Chinese have been doing this year after year after year for decades now, and they now have a debt load of probably about 300 – 350% of GDP, which again, world record. And they’re just not capable of sustaining that in the long run. And then third, and most importantly, the single most important factor behind China’s success these last several decades has been de facto American sponsorship to allow the Chinese to have risk free, secure and above all, cheap access to the world’s energy markets, commodities markets and consumer markets without them having to lift a finger. That’s clearly not in the cards anymore.

So every aspect of growth from every corner of the world looks like it’s going to be lower for quite some time. And the IMF forecast is probably overoptimistic. What we’re dealing with is the unwinding of the globalized world from both a geographic and a demographic point of view. And that was always going to generate low growth rates. Now, low on average does not mean low everywhere. We’re seeing a lot of near shoring, reshoring, friend shoring as countries want to move manufacturing capacity, particularly for critical materials and critical technologies back home. So they’re not vulnerable to say, I don’t know, a genocidal dictatorship that will be growth stories in those places, but by definition, that manufacturing capacity will not be global. So it’s a bit of a global starvation diet from a growth point of view. So for every place where you have a Vietnam or Mexico, the United States will do very well in this environment. You will have a China and Korea and a Germany that goes down the tubes, and that’s just where we are now.

Okay. That’s it for me. See you guys next time.