Peter Zeihan, Author at Zeihan on Geopolitics

Will the US and Canada Actually Merge?

Listen, I didn’t want to make this video, but too many people asked for it…so here we go. What would a potential merger of the US and Canada look like?

The US won’t be invading Canada and there won’t be a nationwide Canadian petition for US membership, but how would it happen? It’s more likely that individual Canadian provinces – like Alberta and Saskatchewan- would secede and apply for US statehood.

These two provinces are young and wealthy, meaning they’re going to have to put the rest of Canada on their backs (financially speaking). They already have strong economic ties to the US, so a merger isn’t as far-fetched for them. The rest of Canada would likely destabilize if those provinces left, due to aging demographics and financial struggles.

For the US, incorporating Canadian provinces would mean a significant reshaping of American politics. However, that doesn’t mean it would be all that difficult to add them in; it’s a much easier process adding states than amending the constitution.

Regardless, I don’t see this happening anytime soon. There’s too many financial, political, and demographic factors at play. But if it did happen, both countries’ political and economic landscapes would dramatically shift.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

All right. I didn’t want to do this video, but too many people on both sides of the border have asked so what would a merger of the United States and Canada look like? All right. Let’s start with the simple thing. The United States is not going to invade Canada. There is no serious talk about Trump. He hasn’t even really joked about it.

So let’s just put that to the side. Canada has just shy of 40 million people. So if it was to join in a single piece, it would be right up with California as our first or second most populous States. But it has a demographic picture that’s kind of a mix. And so what would be far more likely to happen?

Because the idea that a majority of Canadians are going to petition for U.S. membership is a stretch. We’ll be far more likely to happen. Is individual provinces of Canada would secede from the Canadian nation, and then apply for statehood for the United States.

The first two states to watch are the two that are youngest demographically, that are the richest in per capita terms, that export the most commodities per capita, and are already fairly culturally linked in with the United States.

And those are Alberta and Saskatchewan. And if you’re looking at a map of Canada, keep in mind that everyone lives in a thin strip along the southern border. So you’ve got British Columbia on the Pacific. You’ve got some mountains, big mountains, and then Alberta and Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the third of the prairie provinces. And then you crossed something called the Canadian Shield, which is about 1000km of very rugged terrain, heavily forested, where there’s only one road and one rail line.

Before you get to eastern Canada and in eastern Canada, you’ve got the population bloc of Ontario and Quebec, which are the bulk of the country’s population. And then fringed around them are something they call the maritime territories, which are provinces, but lightly populated. And, basically, I’m overstating this, so apologies. Heavily populated by retirees. So from from a financial point of view, there’s not a lot there.

Where the money is, is Ontario and Quebec, the two most populous provinces? British Columbia, which has a big population around Vancouver and serves as the Pacific Gateway and then Alberta, which is the energy hub. Saskatchewan is kind of a little bit of the energy hub. And then a lot of agriculture, just like Alberta. What would happen is Alberta and Saskatchewan or Alberta or Saskatchewan would leave, the Canadian nation, which is legal in Canada.

You just have to have a plebiscite that was affirmed by A90 ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court quite some time ago. With regard to tobacco separatism. Anyway, the reason that these two provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, would leave is largely financial. When Quebec was having all of its fits in the 70s and 80s and early 90s about secession.

The the what? The deal that was struck was that Ontario, which at the time was the richest and the most populous province, would basically pay Quebec to just stop it. So, Quebec has basically been paid for the last few decades to remain part of Canada and not have secession votes. It’s gotten more and more expensive because Quebec’s birthrate, is among the lowest of the major.

It is the lowest of the major provinces. And so the whole province has already functionally slid into obsolescence. The problem is, in Ontario. The birth rate has been very low for a long time. And if it wasn’t for the huge surges of immigration, which have had other complications.

Ontario has now aged to the point that if it wasn’t for huge surges in immigration which generate their own problems, Ontario wouldn’t be able to pay to keep, Quebec in the country anyway, but it is still aging very rapidly.

And of late, Canadians have pushed back against this open door immigration policy, which hasn’t been necessary for economic reasons. But now, culturally, it’s kind of hit a breaking point and everything has slowed significantly, which means that Ontario is now rapidly aging again. And within five years, Alberta will be the province that is expected to pay for, Quebec to remain in the country with a little bit of help from Saskatchewan.

The maritime provinces have already aged out, and if the two most populous provinces age out, there is no way that Saskatchewan and Alberta, which collectively have less than 7 million people, can pay for the rest of Canada to continue to exist unless they just become destitute. That’s the financial argument for why you might see secession in the prairie provinces.

And that’s before you consider that every individual Canadian province, trades more with the United States, and it does with the rest of Canada. And that is true for none of them more than it is for Alberta. So you’d actually solve a fair number of problems if Alberta applied and Saskatchewan applied for American, statehood. Now, the question then is what happens next?

Because these are the two richest bits of the country. And if you split British Columbia off from the rest of the country, because now the prairies have gone a different way, it basically devolves into fourth world status very quickly. It’s industry is already wildly noncompetitive, and basically what has kept B.C. afloat for the last several years is capital flight coming in, most notably from China to be processed in BC and then spread throughout the Canadian economy?

That would stop if there was no land connection. The only other business that you really have in BC is it serves as the entrepot for Asian exports coming into Canada. If you use the super port in Vancouver, repackage everything on the rail and send it east. If you can’t get through Alberta and Saskatchewan. That’s not going to work either.

So BC looks really awful in that circumstances, and the rest of Canada out east doesn’t look great too, because basically it’s a retired country that looks worse than most European demographics. So. If all of these other provinces, either in combination or independently, were to ask for statehood in the United States, we’d have to do some really hard math as to whether it would be worth it.

Picking up a half a dozen states that economically are almost destitute. Basically, you’d be adding a half a dozen mississippis. I’m not sure we would be willing to do that. And that’s before you consider the politics of it. By the way, the United States does political math. Saskatchewan and Alberta would probably be considered 1990s style Texas Republicans a little bit more libertarian, socially moderate, economically conservative.

They wouldn’t get along with today’s MAGA all that well. But the rest of Canada, especially BC and Ontario and Quebec, would be of the Elizabeth Warren branch of the Democratic Party. And getting that through Congress might be kind of interesting. Now, that said, adding states is not as complicated as amending the Constitution. You want to amend the Constitution, you need two thirds vote from both houses of Congress.

And then in three quarters of the states, legislators legislatures have to ratify it. You want to add a state, you just need a simple majority. So you just need a simple majority of Congress. You don’t ask the states at all. And then the president signs off just like a normal bill. So if if if if if if we get to that point, Canada will very quickly become a political flashpoint regardless of what politics looks like in the United States, because you’re talking about potentially adding ten provinces or ten states to the United States, a system that’s 20 senators and about the same number of representatives as California has, which I believe is around 50 right now. So a significant shift in the balance of power, that would completely re fabricate how we have our politics. Now, if that happened in a year, wow. That would be all kinds of explosive, because the United States is in the midst of a pretty deep political reorientation, by itself. But at any time that, you have that sort of disruption, you’re going to change the political math by how the country works.

And then and then you get to talk about how things like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, which are the three of the four biggest line items in the U.S. budget, get re fabricated when you add so many people who are already retired. It would be a hoot. Don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon, but if it was going to happen, that’s how it would go down.

Are Rare Earths Really That Rare?

Rare earths are back in the headlines, but is all the hype worth it? Let’s breakdown what these are and how “rare” they actually are.

Rare earths are byproducts of mining for other metals like nickel, copper, and uranium. While not rare on Earth, they are rarely found in sufficient abundance in a single location for their mining to be economically viable. The only real challenging aspect lies in the refining process, which is just dirty, time-consuming, and expensive…but not all that difficult to do.

China dominates rare earths because they have subsidized production (artificially lowering the price) and they’ve been doing it for decades. So, other countries haven’t had any incentive to turn on their refining capacity, yet. Once the Chinese overplay their hand or the system crumbles, other nations will just ramp up production.

This isn’t really something to fear, other than a few months of issues. However, the US should be more concerned with other critical supply chains like aluminum, steel, and lithium, where the US has yet to build out sufficient infrastructure.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan, coming to you from a very, very chilly Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon page that’s been popping up a lot in the news about rare earths. There’s a lot of angles to this, but basically, it seems that the Trump administration is really interested in getting some production of the stuff. And the question is, how does it work?

What do we need? Where do we go? You may recall recently Trump, falling to Russian propaganda again said that, Ukraine owes the United States $500 billion and it should pay for it with rare earths and not get a security guarantee in exchange. By the way, total USA to Ukraine at this point, according to US government sources, is less than $100 billion, of which two thirds is weapons that were just sitting in warehouses that we were going to blow off anyway.

Anyway, rare earths, unlike the name rare earths are not rare. They are produced as a byproduct of mining. When you’re doing nickel or copper or platinum? Uranium? Palladium. That’s a platinum group. Coal ash, phosphates, sometimes lead.

I said iron ore already. Aluminum. Bauxite. Anyway, there’s like 20 different, macro metals that you mined for, plus coal ash, that produce Rees as a small soda product.

And so what usually happens is you produce the primary thing that you’re after. And then with the waste from your refining process, you maybe do another run of that in order to concentrate the earths a little bit more. But then that next stage of taking that kind of slag that’s been partially refined and turn it into useful rare earth metals, is very dirty.

It’s very polluted, and it takes a lot of time. So usually what happens is you take that slag and you to ship it off to China. Because back in the 1980s and 90s, the Chinese were looking for industries that they could corner and their technology was not very good. And they settled on rare earths because it was expensive and it was dirty.

But they have a very capital flush system where they basically print currency and confiscate everybody’s bank deposits to pay for whatever development plan they want. So what they do is they you build a couple hundred vats of acid and you dissolve everything in the first bout, and then you get the remnants. You put that in a second batch, and then the remnants from that third, that remnants of the fourth that intruded.

And over the course of months, starting with tons of slag material, you might end up with an ounce of a rare earth metal. Anyway, the Chinese cornered this market because it was something that no one else was like, oh, I want to do that. And so they ended up super saturating the market because Chinese economics are about throughput rather than efficiency.

And they continue to subsidize the industry today, which is why, based on the Earth, somewhere between 50% and 95% of it comes out of China, the refined metal. And then, of course, in the last 10 or 15 years, they tried to go, downstream, into processing and building product out of those things. Be even less successful in that.

Anyway, this technology is based on the 1920s. So there’s nothing that’s difficult about this, and it doesn’t really take a lot of time to set up. It’s just that once you actually start putting your slag into the acid, it’s going to be months before you get any material. So the problem is not rare earths per se. The problem isn’t even production.

Rare earths are a byproduct of any number of industrial, mining and purification processes. The problem is building out that processing capacity. Now, how long does that take? I would argue that in Australia, Malaysia, France and the United States, most of that work has already been done. But nobody wants to turn it on because you’ve got several months where you’re not getting any product.

And the Chinese continue to super saturate the market and provide the world with below cost rare earths. So at some point, a switch is going to be flipped, and everyone’s mind when they realize either that the Chinese are overplaying their hand with their control of the processing capacity or trying to just brakes. And everyone realizes that if they still want the stuff, they’re going to have to make it themselves.

Once that happens, all of this spare refining capacity around the world will spring up. And the problem we solved in six months to a year. Until then, we are in the unfortunate position that the US government seems to be beholden to Chinese and Russian propaganda on the rareness of rare earths, and that, unfortunately, is shaping policy in a number of places.

It’s like if you want to be paranoid about things that the Chinese dominate. This isn’t where you go. You should be concerned of other types of processing, such as turning bauxite into aluminum, turning iron ore into steel, turning lithium concentrate into lithium metal because those are places we’re setting up the, replacement infrastructure. The United hasn’t really started at scale yet.

And if the Chinese break before that’s done, we will then have to build out that infrastructure in an environment when we can’t get the intermediate product. And that will generate the mother of all inflation pulses. So, you know, one miracle at a time, I’d argue that this specific problem, rare earths, is not all that much of a problem.

There’s plenty of streams coming from plenty of places. We just have to turn on a few things to solve it.

What Trump Should Take on Instead…

Newspaper photo of President Donald Trump

The last few videos have covered all the things that Trump is focusing on (and doing wrong), and many of you have asked where he SHOULD be spending his time. So, today we’re discussing the things that should be prioritized.

The US has a unique global position, its economy is strong, it has a powerful military, and it’s largely self-sufficient when it comes to energy and food. With that in mind, here are the four main opportunities I see: Europe, the UK, Southeast Asia, and Cuba.

Each of these places offers the US something it could use in the decades coming. Whether that’s a foothold in reshaping European economics and diplomacy, adding the UK into NAFTA to strengthen economic ties, securing a future of industrial capacity in Southeast Asia, or adding a low cost manufacturing partner in Cuba.

Basically, I would stop spending my time antagonizing our allies and focus on strengthening our economic and strategic partnerships.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. We’ve been doing a number of pieces on how Donald Trump is, manipulating the world for various outcomes. A lot of you have written in and asked me, well, what should he be working on? And I’m going to assume that you’re asking that in a constructive way.

So here we go. Remember that we are in this weird moment in history where the United States is really the only country of size that has a positive demographic structure and so still has a consumption led economy. We’ve got military reach, around the world. We have navy that’s more powerful than the next eight put together, if not all of them self-sufficient, energy, self-sufficient in food.

We’re really holding the handle of the whip on everything that matters. The question is how we want to use it. And if you look around the world, the opportunities are just robust. Right now in the Middle East, Iran has suffered a generational blowback. It’s lost its allies and Hezbollah and, Syria and the time is here to completely remake the region, really, however we would want.

We’ve got something similar going on in China as it’s facing demographic, financial, transportation and strategic collapse. Ten years from now, China won’t exist. And by the end of this century, the Han of necessity won’t exist. Talk about just a wondrous opportunity to shape things in a different way. Donald Trump instead is, picking fights with all of the allies, specifically the allies that we’re going to need to help re fabricate the future, especially our own in terms of manufacturing.

So I look for the low hanging fruit that is out there right now, of which there is an immense volume. Let’s start with Europe. Germany is in the midst of an election campaign. No matter who wins, it’s going to be a weak government with three parties. It’s going to be very difficult for to lead at home and impossible for it to lead on the European stage.

In France we have a hung parliament, and if we have elections again this year, that locks the French out of policymaking for at least six months, assuming they come up with a new government that’s actually cohesive, which is very unlikely. I mean, the France is kind of out to lunch.

Italy has a reasonably strong leader in the form of Giorgia meloni. But she too leads a coalition government, and she can only go so far. And then the Brits are gone because of Brexit. So there is no leadership in Europe. If you wanted to take control of the continent from an economic and a diplomatic point of view and reshape how it works for generations, now is the time. And instead we had JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference talking to the Europeans about how European cultural evolutions are a greater threat to the United States than either Russian nuclear weapons or Chinese predatory practices and cyber, attacks.

It was easily the most destructive speech that I could have come up with in terms of solidifying the alliance against the Russians, against the Chinese, to create a new world. And I’ve never seen so much diplomatic and political power by any country pissed away in 45 minutes. But that’s where we are. I don’t know if it’s too late to kind of pick up the pieces, but clearly keep Vance away from all of them.

That opportunity, unfortunately, may have been destroyed in a single hour. Second up, the Brits, the Brits voted themselves out of the European Union several years ago. And if you’re like me and you see the demographic changes coming that the European Union is going to have to re fabricate itself from its current state as an export union to something else, because if you don’t have enough workers, you don’t have enough taxpayers.

All of the economic models that we have right now just don’t make sense. So getting out of that before the break and starting on something new, that made a lot of sense to me, puts the Brits never got started on anything new. They’ve just kind of been in this netherworld in the seven years since, and we now have a newish government in London that is giving fresh insipidus to the term disorganized destruction.

They can’t seem to form a policy on anything. They’re completely rudderless. Well, as the world did, China fires, we’re going to need some partners to build an industrial plant that can replace what the Chinese are going to take away with them as they fall. The United Kingdom is a first world country with a highly technocratic system and phenomenal engineers.

I would love to see NAFTA expand to take in the United Kingdom. And since the Brits can’t make any decisions right now, having somebody of Trump’s, how should I say, this delicate nature impose a solution on them would be brilliant. And instead, the administration has basically just ignored the United Kingdom altogether. Third is Southeast Asia. This is home to about a billion people.

We already count Vietnam as one of our top ten trading partners, a position it’s just gained in the last few years. And it is the part of the world that is most likely to pick up pieces of the industrial plant that the Chinese can no longer operate. Also, most of the countries in Southeast Asia already have lower operating costs.

It’s a geographic feature. Most of Southeast Asia is jungle and islands and, peninsula and mountain. So it’s really hard for them to integrate in the traditional sense. And people flock to the cities because they don’t want to work in tropical agriculture. What that means is most of the, states interact by water for their trade. They have limited physical connection.

So they don’t have any of the bad blood, like what has existed historically in Europe or Northeast Asia. It’s very easy for them to make economic deals with one another. And they have also because people are crowded in the cities, there are workforce is cheaper on average than the skill points that there are compared to the global average.

So they’re very, very competitive in any number of things. And as China falls, this is the region that’s going to do the best. And so a tighter relationship between North America and Southeast Asia is really the smartest play that we could take in terms of our trade and our future security and economic relations. And Trump on China has done almost nothing so far.

And on Southeast Asia it’s been crickets. But with the Americans basically ignoring East Asia, the Chinese are doing everything they can to double down and triple down in Southeast Asia to hedge out the United States. So the opportunity is still there. We should seize it with both hands. And then fourth, and finally is something much closer to home.

And that’s Cuba. We’re in this weird little situation right now where Mexico has become so high value added that it needs a low cost manufacturing partner. And I would argue that the workforce in Cuba is roughly half the skills of the Mexicans for about one tenth of the cost. So if Cuba were to be opened up and were to join the North American trading family in some way, it would be a huge addition.

Now, obviously there are some political problems between here and there. The United States and Cuba have not gotten along ever since Castro’s rise in the early 60s. But I would argue that while I think Trump’s bare knuckle approach negotiations with the allies is perhaps not the best way to go, unleashing that kind of fire and fury on Cuba, I think would be highly entertaining.

And it could actually lead to some political shifts in Havana that we would like a great deal. It’s not just about the economic side of things there. Getting Cuba back into the American family of nations is something that would hugely boost our security and basically make it impossible for anyone from the Eastern hemisphere to punch into the Western Hemisphere, or at least are part of it.

So those are kind of my big four. I quit picking fights with the allies, especially the ones, you know, you’re going to need for economic issues and start picking fights with the countries that, are actually trying to hobble you, maybe. And in the meantime, solidify relations with the countries that are on the fringes who could really be part of a very bright future.

Trump Takes on Illegal Immigration

Trump’s immigration policies have caused quite the stir, specifically his hardline stance on illegal migration. So, how will these policies impact the US economy?

The US is in the midst of needing to double its industrial capacity, which will require a large labor force. Losing the population of 10-15 million undocumented immigrants would dig that hole even deeper. Trump isn’t approaching this from an economic or security perspective, his migration policies are being shaped by ideology.

By making the conditions for migrants worse and cutting off certain paths to legally enter the US, it will inadvertently encourage illegal border crossings and create enforcement inefficiencies. Practices like mass deportations are pulling resources from other important tasks and making future cooperation between the law and migrants less likely.

The better approach would be providing legal pathways for migrants to integrate into the economy, but Trump’s path is creating a permanent underclass.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a chilly Colorado. Today we’re near the most recent in Trump taking on the world. We’re talking about, Trump policies on illegal migration and where they are going to lead. First a little backdrop and, scene setting. A couple things. Keeping in mind, number one, the United States has somewhere between 10 and 15 million under documented people in the United States.

So that’s a substantial number of folks. And the United States is in the process of doubling the size of its industrial plant. As we prepare for the end of China as a meaningful participant in the trade system, that means a lot of blue collar jobs, and Ford loaded with construction jobs. So, anything that inhibits the labor force is definitely going to inhibit our ability to prepare for a post Chinese world.

So put that in the back of your mind as we go through the rest of this. There has always been a mixed view of immigration in general on illegal migration, in particular in the United States. As a rule, we go through ebbs and flows. We’re definitely at an ebb right now. And as a rule, the business community has been in favor of larger flows of migration in any form.

In order to access workforce, that has not changed. What has changed is that with the reshuffling of the American political deck, the business community is no longer in the Republican Party. Other swing voters now. And so they don’t have a say in immigration policy in the way they might have before. So as the United States goes through this transition, as we have a nativist moment and as, the Make America Great Again, movement has basically decided to take a very, very hard line on things like the border and migration.

Those are the folks that are making policy decisions at the national government. There will be an economic cost for that. The question is whether or not what Michael wants can be achieved. And in doing so, how does that reshape the world? And especially, of course, the United States, another little piece of backdrop, any policy that ignores why people are doing what they are and ascribe somebody else’s motives to them, generally doesn’t work.

This is one of the reasons why Maoist China was such a disaster. Same with Brezhnev’s, Soviet Union and Chavez’s Venezuela. People used ideology, their own ideology, to ascribe motives to other people and made policy based on that. And that’s a lot of what we’re seeing in Washington right now with the migration question. The official story is that these are a lot of illegal people who are doing a lot of bad things and a lot of crime.

There’s nothing in government statistics or private sector statistics that supports that. As a rule, migrants are less than one third as likely to commit a crime as an American citizen, largely because they know that the consequences are deportation. For the most part, well over 90%. The people who are crossing the border are coming in, searching of the American dream, a safer place to raise their children, a place where they can work and earn more money.

And above all, a place where rule of law works better than where they’re from. But by ascribing false motives, the enforcement system is really causing some problems in the short and ultimately the long term. So let’s start with the border, as was introduced under the Bush administration and really built up by size by the time we get to the Obama years, the tendency of illegals crossing north shifted.

It used to be that you tried to avoid the Border Patrol, but then people discovered things like asylum laws where you could apply for asylum and get into the court system. And after a certain amount of time, get a court case that could rule, a lot of criticism of system where people just to the system. But, you know, you’ve got, people waiting two and three years for court date.

And it turns out that the vast majority of people do show up, because they do get a relatively favorable reading. What has happened most recently is that the Trump administration has basically shut that down. They’re not even accepting applications. So if you show up to the border, you turn yourself over the border Patrol, they simply turn you around and walk you right back.

What that has done is encourage people to go back to the old system that we had before the 2000s, and basically just trying to sneak around the Border Patrol. And in doing that, Donald Trump in his first term made it very, very, very easy to cross the border undetected. You remember the border wall? Well, the border wall cuts through the middle of the Sonoran and the Chihuahuan Desert, which are the greatest natural barriers in the Western Hemisphere.

Fantastic for stopping illegal migrants from flowing. A lot of them just die on the trip. But if you build a border wall, that means you need to build 50 odd construction roads across half of that natural barrier. So all you have to do if you’re an illegal is use a ladder once to quadruple your income, and then you’re on a road.

And whether you’re working with a coyote or on your own with a dirt bike, all of a sudden it’s gotten much, much easier to cross. So I have no doubt that 20, 30 years from now, when we looked at back of this period, Donald Trump will go down in history as the greatest supporter of illegal migration in American history.

And that’s before some of these other changes. Ultimately, because most of the people crossing the border north want a better life, they are looking for avenues to cooperate with local government because living in the shadows isn’t great. If you’re an illegal in the United States and you have no chance of getting documentation, you probably only work for cash, which means you’re never going to buy a house.

You’re only going to rent. And if you pay for everything with cash, robbers tend to identify that and target you. And if you can’t go to law enforcement after you get robbed because you don’t have documentation, you may get deported, you then don’t cooperate with law enforcement, which makes it a lot easier for gangs and cartels to recruit on both sides of the border.

Or you can provide the illegals with a way to become legal. What’s going on now is that the Trump administration is taking the sharply opposite tact. And that’s going to hurt us in two ways. Number one, he really, really, really wants to have some showy, mass deportations. So he’s redirected other law enforcement to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, taking people off of other law enforcement duties to send them against illegal migrants.

He’s been hit very hard by this. But really, there’s none of the three letter agencies that haven’t seen a direction. And that means we’re not looking at things like money laundering or child porn. And there was a really a scary moment when people were starting to be pulled off of active monitoring of terrorist groups internationally, to be put in Chicago to round up illegals.

Luckily, the Trump administration backed down from that. But we’re seeing basically a hollowing out of the law enforcement capacity at a federal level to focus on this one thing. That’s a problem. Number two, Trump wasn’t happy with the numbers. So instead of going after the criminals, which means you go after people one at a time and you have to investigate to make sure they’re a criminal and you have to do a sting operation to get them.

They started going after groups of illegals who had shown no propensity for engaging in illegal behavior. So you started just to go to where those people were. So to use the stereotypical ones that had been proven true in the last couple of weeks, they’ve been going to churches on Sunday morning when people are with their families and basically arresting Hispanics in mass.

They’ve been going to food banks for people who are having problems. They’ve been going to Home Depot where there’s day workers, any place where you’re going to get a concentration of people with a tan have basically been, been targeted by law enforcement in order to generate the numbers that are necessary to meet Trump’s quotas, which he’s handed out to everybody.

And then once those people are grabbed, Trump tries to make it a very, very showy deportation, mostly using military jets. Well, here’s the fun thing about military jets, the globe masters that they’re using because they’ve got the reach. They’re designed to move like helicopters and tanks and equipment, but not really designed to move people. So you have to put seats in them and they can’t operate nearly as efficiently as, say, as a commercial airliner.

So it costs about $6,000 a person just to fly them to the country. You’re going to dump them off. And so it’s turned out to be this incredibly expensive operation that has netted very few criminals, but has also introduced a lot of fear into the community because the most recent one, just in the last week, is law enforcement is now going to the asylum hearings for the people who have kept their nose clean and cooperated with the system from the very beginning, and arresting them before they can even go in to get their hearing.

Or then, of course, if they get their hearing and denied immediately hauling them off in chains. And this is dissuading anyone who is an illegal migrant from ever cooperating with the system. Now go back to what we need to do as a country, double the size of the industrial plant. That’s going to be concentrated in certain areas, which means these illegal migrants are going to be clustered in places where the job opportunities are.

And now if they can’t cooperate with the federal government, they’re going to live as a permanent underclass, which is going to build up crime possibilities on all sides in all of those cities, and in no particular order, those cities are Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Birmingham, Montgomery, mobile, Atlanta, Richmond, Norfolk, Charlotte, and all of the other major cities of the North Carolina cluster. These are the places where the industrial activity and construction has been concentrated. This is going to be where the Hispanic migrant community is most likely to relocate. And now these are the cities that are most likely to have a starkly increased crime wave, because there is no point in migrants now cooperating with the system.

We’re going back to the system we had before the 2000s where migrants really were an underclass. I mean, the smart play here is to provide avenues towards legal migration, even if that doesn’t lead towards citizenship, so that the people can be part of the system so they can have a bank account so they don’t get robbed, so they can participate with law enforcement, and to shut the cartels out of our communities.

But what do I know?

Trump Takes on Trade

Photo of man standing in front of trade shipping containers

There’s plenty of tools at the disposal of the US President and tariffs are one of them. When used appropriately – i.e., to get something else or discourage a certain action – tariffs can be a very effective measure. However, Trump is using them as an end, rather than a means to an end.

This has blossomed into “reciprocal tariffs”. These aim to match foreign tariffs on US goods. At first glance, this idea seems fair, but the complexity of international trade, vast product categories, and admin that would be involved make this nearly impossible.

If Trump continues down this path, it is likely that US international trade would come screeching to a stop and a severe recession would follow.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. We are continuing with our, coverage of Trump’s first month in office. We’ve gone through the Middle East and China, the former Soviet Union, Europe. Today we’re going to talk about, international trade, specifically tariffs. Now, tariffs obviously are something that Trump is quite fond of. And it’s pretty clear by this point that he doesn’t necessarily see tariffs as a means to an end, but just an end in of of themselves, which is not great economic policy unless you already have your industrial plants set up.

And even then it’s wildly inefficient. But let’s focus on more of the specifics. I’ve talked at least briefly about the tariffs on America’s closest trading partners. I think it’s worth underlining what a couple of these things would do. One of the new ones is Trump says he wants to do a 100% automotive tariff on Canada.

Keep in mind that every car manufactured in the United States includes a substantial percentage of parts that come from Canada and Mexico, most of them over one third, a lot of them two thirds. And vice versa. It’s a very integrated system. So if you were to put anything more than about a 15 to 20% tariff on autos specifically, are you going to be taxing things as they go back and forth across the border?

And you’re going to cause a massive headache for American consumers, raising the price of your average vehicle by somewhere between 4 and $8000. If you do 100% tariff, we just stop making cars. Detroit collapses within a week, and Texas within a month. So, you know, not my recommendation. But I think a more interesting topic is one that’s gotten a little coverage.

The Trump implemented last week and something called reciprocal tariffs. And it sound on a surface to be pretty fair. The idea is if somebody else has a 15% tariff versus a product, that comes from the United States, then you should flip that and have a 15% tariff on anything that you take from them that is in that product category, and at least on the surface, against places like China where tariffs are high and subsidization is high, in order to force American products out of the product mix.

It seems like a great idea, right? A couple problems here. Number one doesn’t always line up that way for climactic reasons. So, for example, if Kenya has a tariff on imported coffee, we’re going to what tariff coffee we bring in from Kenya because, you know, we don’t export coffee, so we’d just be charging our people more.

That’s a pretty minor one. The bigger one, though, is administration. There are literally hundreds of thousands of product categories. And that’s before you consider intermediate product trade. And so if you want to do a reciprocal tariff, number one, you need a massive staff, at least an order of magnitude more than what we have a Customs Enforcement in the FTC, Federal Trade Commission right now just to learn all the product categories and all the tariffs for all 200 odd countries in the world.

And then you would need at least five times as many of that staff to then enforce, these tariffs at the border. Keep in mind that most international trade, even today, is not digitized fully. It might be on the container level, but each container is going to contain somewhere between dozens and thousands of products, and typically not all from the same country, because as container ships go around the world, they drop things off, they pick things up.

If there’s space in a container, you can always shove more in there. And by the time it gets to the United States, it’s a mess. And then what comes off is not all of it necessarily. Some of it gets shipped back out. And so somebody has to manually enter every single product. So it’s not so much that, reciprocal tariffs isn’t fair or is at least intellectually a good idea, but actually putting it into process basically ends trade, because it’s impossible to administrate with anything approaching the number of people we have in government right now in total.

Much less if you wanted to do anything else. Now, the fact that Trump has announced this anyway gets back to the general theme of all of this is that he’s built a completely incompetent administration that won’t tell him the truth, because the truth might not make him look great. But on this specific topic, it’s less of a designed incompetence and more a purposeful incompetence by his other staff.

Trump’s trade representative is a guy by the name of Jamison Greer, who is a smart dude who basically was raised from a pup by Robert Lighthizer. And Lighthizer was Trump’s first term trade representative. And Lighthizer has been in and out of government and at the center of American trade law going back to the 1980s into the Reagan administration.

So, I mean, this is a guy who knows everything, is everything about trade. He’s not shy about using tariffs, but it’s always when there’s a specific goal in mind in order to reshape the relationship. He just doesn’t just do tariffs or turfs anyway. Greer learned at Lighthizer he was his chief of staff, during Trump’s first term.

Definitely knows what’s going on. And definitely knows that reciprocal tariffs is a horrible idea unless you’re going to do an absolutely massive state expansion, which is definitely not in the cards. So one of two things either happened. Number one, he probably took the advice of Lighthizer because one of the things that Lighthizer learned from his four years working with Trump the first time around is you never contradict Trump.

Not in public, not in private. You just nod. You smile. You make him think that you were one of the brainless people that he has surrounded himself, that do nothing but tell him how wonderful he is, and then hopefully he gives you enough room and enough lack of attention, for you to actually go and do your real work.

And for Lighthizer, at least in part, that worked. He was able to renegotiate NAFTA and the Korean trade deal. He got a new trade deal with Japan, made a lot of progress on a trade deal with the United Kingdom. But then, we just ran out of time. And then there were the events of January 6th. So, Greer clearly knows that reciprocal tariffs are horrible.

Just beyond stupid idea. But either one. He kept his mouth shut, nodded, and smiled. Or number two. He told Trump this and, managed to do it in a way that didn’t get himself fired already. Even odds for probably the first one being the way one or whatever went.

So we’re going to see more things like this.

Because the only way that reciprocal tariffs can work is with a staff you can’t build. So either we go 1 or 2 directions at this time. Number one, reciprocal tariffs are actually implemented, in which case pretty much all international trade stops in the United States falls into a really, really ugly recession in a short period of time or, or there’s an actually an effort to implement it on a case by case basis for specific countries, absolutely wrecking trade relations with that country.

That could get interesting based on who you choose to go after. Hopefully it would not be a country like Canada. Oh my god. But if you did against India, that could actually set the stage for changing the relationship in any number of ways. But Trump coming to that conclusion would require someone to explain to him how reciprocal tariffs overall are.

Really bad idea. And I don’t think that is going to happen at all.

Trump Takes on China…or Not

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit

China is on its last legs. Its demographic picture is far past terminal. Its financial system makes Enron look responsible. Simply feeding its people is far beyond Beijing’s capacity without legions of outside assistance. And with the wider world ever-more-firmly turning against Chinese manufactured goods, there is little reason to expect an industrial recovery. If you don’t care for China, now is the time to nudge the country into history’s ash heap.

And so Donald Trump is picking trade fights with Mexico and Canada, the two countries indispensable to the United States if the goal is to create a world independent of the Chinese. In doing so, Trump is granting China that most precious of all commodities: time.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. We’re doing the latest in a series on what Trump is up to in the world. And today we’re going to talk about the Chinese. Now the Chinese are having a shit time. The demographic situation keeps getting worse. We’re at the point where we’re probably only a few years away from the general collapse of their labor market, and we have seen their labor costs go up by a factor of roughly 15 since the year 2000, which is, one of the 3 or 4 fastest increases in human history.

Financially, they’ve expanded their credit pool by a factor of 3500 at least since the year 2000. For point of comparison, the U.S has tripled. So we have an Enron style bubble. And basically every economic subsector they have, it’s probably a lot more than that 35 times, because they change the way they look to statistics when it comes to local government debt.

And they just cut it out of the system altogether. Stopped reporting. That probably adds another, times five. So, you know, 40 times anyway, so massively overexposed, massively leveraged. In terms of manufacturing, that means their labor costs have gone up. And so they’re not nearly as competitive as they once were. The Mexicans are now more competitive in almost every major manufacturing sector in terms of agriculture.

They’re the world’s largest importer in absolute terms, and they’re the least efficient producer in terms of the input per calorie that they get out. And almost all of those inputs are imported as well. From a security point of view, yes, they’ve got a lot of ships, but they need to be able to control global sea lanes if they’re going to protect their commerce.

And that is the job of the US Navy. So if you ever have a fight with the US, there goes their entire economic and development model. It’s just a series of bad upon bad upon bad. And at the very top, their government has become completely ossified, as chairman G has basically put the finishing touches on his cult of personality.

So it’s very difficult to get anything done in terms of policy. Not to mention that he’s pretty much blind to what’s going on because he’s shot the messenger so many times. Nobody brings him anything. You put all that together. Now is a great time to push against the Chinese and just knock them over the edge so they can fall into

The dustbin of history. So, what is going on with U.S. policy towards China is almost the opposite of what Donald Trump said he wanted to do during the election campaign. He took a very hard anti-China line, and one of the many impacts that Donald Trump had in his first term is he changed the conversation in the United States about China from potentially being a partner to definitely being a perceived threat or a foe.

But since he became president a second time, we haven’t seen really much on China. There’s been a blanket 10%, tariff on everything. And that’s about it. Instead, Donald Trump has reserved most of the fights that he’s picked for our allies and especially our close neighbors in Mexico and Canada. From the Chinese point of view, this has been not just a reprieve, but it’s allowed them to continue doing what they’re doing and shoving products into the American market.

Because ultimately, in a world without China, the United States is going to have to build out a massive amount of industrial plant in order to produce the things that we used to get from East Asia. And there is no way that that can happen unless it’s hand in glove with the Canadians and the Mexicans in the NAFTA system.

And so by picking tariff fights with the closest neighbors, what Trump has done is strongly disincentivize anyone from relo hating their operations from China to the United States. And that was in full swing calendar year 2024 and 2023 saw the greatest declines in foreign direct investment into the Chinese system that we have seen in ages. In fact, last year, total new investment in China was only $4.5 billion.

We haven’t seen a number like that since the early 90s. Companies were running to get out and getting to the North American market. But at a stroke, Trump’s tariff policy has frozen that in place, which is setting us up for a combination of factors. That is really problematic because if we haven’t built out enough industrial plant to replace the Chinese system when it crashes, we’re just not going to have stuff.

Now, the road from here to there was always going to be difficult. We’re talking about an environment that is not particularly conducive to industrial expansion, and the issue is a capital and labor. It’s largely a baby boomer story. When you retire, you liquidate your savings, you move out of stocks and bonds into cash and T-bills and the money that used to fuel economic development and credit in the broader system shrivels up.

Well, two thirds of the boomers have already retired. Two thirds of that money has already shifted over. So I’d argue that the rough tripling of capital costs we’ve seen in the last 5 or 6 years is largely demographic driven. That has very little to do with the economic cycle or policies of the Fed or Trump or Biden.

It’s just demographics. And on top of having now basically a capital shortage, that we need to somehow use what’s left to metabolize and build up this industrial plant. Trump has pledged to increase the annual budget deficit of the federal government by over $1 trillion a year. Now, you might say, well, he’s going to get some savings out of the federal government with all these mass firings.

But keep in mind that the vast majority of federal spending is Medicare, Social Security, defense, and, Medicaid. Those four together are the 7,080% of the total. If Trump does what he says he wants to do and fires a full one quarter of the federal workforce, that actually only reduces the government budget by about 2%.

So it’s a lot of sound and fury without a lot of movement. And on the backside, he’s going to add $1 trillion to deficit spending. That’s going to make everything else a lot more expensive and a lot more difficult. There’s also the labor situation. The United States, if it needs to double its industrial plant, needs a lot of blue collar workers to fill those jobs, and a lot of construction workers to build the plant in the first place.

Well, most construction workers are undocumented in some way. And so a mass deportation program not only stalls our ability to build in the first place, it shrinks the labor market overall. And at a time when we’re already at record low unemployment levels, all of this is making the Re industrialization more difficult. And now the tariff policy is forcing companies to take a pause and what they were already doing and give the United States kind of a side eye, because we now have something that we’re not used to hearing here.

Regulatory instability. And the Chinese at the moment look more stable than we do from that measure. And this is obviously a problem unless you’re a Chinese, of course, because what Donald Trump is doing right now is granting the Chinese that most valuable of geopolitical commodities time.

Photo of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit from Wikimedia Commons

Trump Takes on the Middle East

Israeli successes across the Levant have transformed the broader Middle East, wrecking the countries and militant groups that have long scourged the region. The moment is ripe for a complete reordering of regional norms. To capitalize upon this rare moment, Donald Trump wants to invest blood and treasure in the region’s most worthless and historically fraught chunk of land in order to build…hotels?

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Alright. We’re now going to do the third in our opening series on what Trump is doing in his new administrative term. And today we’re talking about the Middle East. Now, the Middle East is ripe for change. We’ve had, wow. We’ve had a lot of shifts in just the last six months, but really in the last two years.

So quick review. After attacks a little over a year and a half ago, now you’re gonna have to go. Wow. Has been that long? By Hamas. That’s the political group. The terror group that rules the Gaza Strip, which is an extreme southern Israel after the launch of terror attack. And Israel killed over a thousand people and took a couple hundred people hostage.

Israel’s been on a tear. It started with a borderline incompetent, invasion and occupation of Gaza. No matter how much went back and forth and how much it smashed and how much it bombed, and how many people were arrested, it just couldn’t root out Hamas. Because everybody who lives in Hamas is basically living in an open air prison.

And the people were given an opportunity to leave. What little they had was destroyed. And it was very, very easy for Hamas to replace any of its war losses with new recruits, because we got 2.2 million people with absolutely no options anyway. Well, that was all going on. And I’m just like, this is looking really bad. Israel was doing other things, and then it launched a decapitation strike using exploding pagers and of course, a lot of airdrop bombs on a military group, a terror group called Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

And in doing so took out the entire leadership. But shortly after that, the Turks managed to maneuver things over in Syria so that the Syrian government collapsed. And all of a sudden, if you’re Israel, you’re looking around and things have gotten pretty good. Hamas is in a box. We haven’t been destroyed, but they haven’t been able to strengthen, and all of the regional allies are gone.

Hezbollah has been decapitated, and the only way that you would resurrect Hezbollah is with a lot of additional support and training and personnel, which, ironically, would come to or through Syria, which is now gone. And that left Iran, which was the ultimate sponsor for Hezbollah and Syria on the wrong side of Iraq and really unable to do anything meaningful.

And so they were reduced to using diplomatic attachés to shovel cash into the country, one envelope at a time. And it’s just not doing what they needed to do. Even if Iran is able to regenerate Hezbollah, it took them 30 years to do it the last time. It’s not going to turn on a dime here. So there’s a real opportunity, not just for Israel, but for everyone in the Middle East, to turn the page and move on to something new.

It helps that no one in the Middle East likes the Palestinians at all. And specifically Hamas. So there’s a possibility here with a little bit of leadership and a little bit of creativity of the United States, that we really could open a new book. Now, just don’t turn a page, open a new book on what the Middle East is.

So Donald Trump wants to build a hotel. Donald Trump’s idea is that all of the Palestinians of Gaza will be relocated to another country. Keep in mind, all the countries hate them. And the United States will take ownership of Gaza, which is a little chunk of land sandwiched between Israel and Egypt, making it the least strategically valuable chunk of territory in the entire region.

And it will develop it into a resort area. And oh my God, opportunities like this don’t happen. But once a century or so. And this is not how you cement the future of a new region. Let’s just let’s just go down the reasons why this is a horrible idea. Number one, moving 2.2 million people. Let’s leave aside the whole genocide human rights thing.

I’ll let other people tackle that topic. Let’s talk mechanics. The last couple of times that we saw people relocated against their will, governments were participating in the relocation. Specifically, you had the partition of India, where a newfound India and Pakistan were basically agreeing to swap Hindus and Muslims so that they weren’t living among one another, and they had a better chance at having a peaceful coexistence.

The one before that is called the Beninese decree. In the aftermath of World War Two, when newly Soviet satellites like Poland and Czechoslovakia uprooted Germans and shipped them off to, the new German boundaries, specifically East Germany. When that happened, you had states that had agency and capacity and, gravitas to make it happen. So the new East Germany did a massive building program in order to accept its own people, back its own ethnic ethnics.

And the Soviets helped with transport and food. Also, you’re talking about northern Europe, which even in the aftermath of World War Two, had some of the densest transport arteries on the planet, including roads and trains. You had the same thing in India. This is part of the old British colonial mandate or the Raj. And as a result, you had the parts of Pakistan and India that are viable, economically viable, climatically livable, were attached to one another.

And so you could basically just run people on the roads, on the rail, back and forth until you achieve what you wanted. Also, in both cases, they were moving. People had housing to move into in the case of Germany, we’d had a population drop in the war. In the case of India and Pakistan, people were moving in each other’s homes.

It was ugly. It took years. There were definitely lots of complications, but it kind of sort of worked. That’s not what we’re looking at here. Number one, the Palestinians don’t want to move. Number two, there’s no infrastructure at all linking them to anywhere else. You either cross through the unpopulated part of Israel, that is the Negev, in order to get the unpopulated part of Jordan before you eventually get into a place that has already 70%.

How a Palestinian. But the leadership of Jordan is Hashemite Arab, and they hit the Palestinians, and they basically oppress the people, so they have a chance of retaining their throne. You throw 2 million pissed off Palestinians in that mix and Jordan goes from being a quasi failed state and a satellite of Israel to a chaos cannon in no time flat.

And all of a sudden, you’ve taken the problem of the Gaza Strip and turned it into a formal state called Jordan. Alternatively, you could go through exodus in reverse and cross a scenario where there’s almost no roads and certainly no rail. Then you get to the, Suez Canal where there is a bridge, thank God, and you can get over to populated Egypt, literally Exodus and verse, where the Egyptians say to the Palestinians and find a place in a country that is failing because it is now unpopulated, the ability of the country to grow its food itself.

And that’s before you consider global climate change or global trade breakdowns, which means that very soon the Egyptians won’t even be able to sell cotton and citrus on international markets to buy wheat to feed their own people. So you’re basically pre-judging the Palestinians for starvation and then we get a new access the other direction with Palestinians instead of Jews.

Those are the only option. So the only places you could walk from Gaza, we’re talking 2.2 million people. You cannot relocate them any other way. And when you’re done assuming all of that works, somehow you now have a chunk of land that is nothing but rubble abutting unpopulated Egypt and lightly populated southern Israel that you’re going to turn into.

What of Las Vegas, of the Middle East? No. And for that, you’re going to burn American blood and treasure, which is going to take way more than what we used in Iraq in order to get something in a place that nobody wants to be anyway. I’ve heard dumber ideas. Not often.

Yeah, I’m done with this one. Tomorrow we’ll talk about China.

No, I’m not done. I forgot to give you the forecast. So if Trump proceeds in trying to get the Arab states of the Middle East who don’t have the capacity to come and get the Palestinians to uproot the Palestinians, who don’t have the infrastructure to move the Palestinians or house or feed or water the Palestinians, if he tries to get them to do it anyway, talk about pressure on the relationship.

We’re at this wild moment where both Russian and Iranian power and the bulk of the Middle East has been broken in a short period of time. At the same time, if Trump does what he says he wants to, he will provide a years long window of opportunity for both of those countries to reestablish their old position, and then some, because Trump will do what Trump does and he’ll put pressure on everyone.

He started with Jordan. He moved to Egypt. He’s now working on Saudi Arabia, by the way. There’s even less infrastructure connecting Saudi Arabia to the zone in question. And he’s going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And if he does that, all relations with all Arab countries are going to freeze. And it will be very, very easy for the Russians and the Iranians to reestablish their position, however, and wherever they want.

Now I’m done. Tomorrow’s China.

Trump Takes on Russia…or Maybe It’s the Other Way Around

US President Donald J Trump, both directly and via his senior staff, has outlined his administration’s policies for Europe, Ukraine and Russia. If the policies come to pass it will be the greatest expansion of Russian power since the conquering of Eastern Europe in the waning days of World War II, and a long-term hobbling of American military and intelligence capabilities on a global scale.

And that’s not even the worst part.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Before we get into today’s video and really this whole series, keep in mind that I’m talking about very, very dynamic situations where somebody says something and somebody else responds. Specifically on today’s video about Russia, Defense Secretary Hagel said one set of things. He walked them back a few hours later. Trump countermanded him.

He walked them back the other direction, Trump said. So it’s all in motion. So what I am presenting in the video is my best understanding of where we actually are, as opposed to all the Douglas blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, now you know that. Here we go.

Okay, guys, I need my notes for this one. So I’m going to try to look down as little as possible. So there’s not too much that has to be edited out, but there’s definitely going to be some.

It has been a remarkably good month for the Russians ever since Donald Trump has come in. He stressed America’s alliance system to an extreme, and over the last few days, we’ve seen a number of decisions made publicly that have basically bent to the Russian will on any number of issues.

It started probably in the first full week, Donald Trump’s term, when he turned Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency on the Central Intelligence Agency. And now the agency has been the primary function within the US government for decades of informing the American president of the threats coming from Moscow in general, and has actually been one of the bureaus, has been most active in countering those threats.

And one of the first things that Musk did is went after the senior staff at the agency.

Specifically, the folks that are involved in threat detection and briefing the upper ranks of the U.S government on possible options. Donald Trump has made sure that his inner circle doesn’t have anyone who is competent in it, because common people have opinions on topics, because they know things about topics, and Donald Trump doesn’t like to be countered.

So he has always had a hostile relationship with the agency whose job it is to inform the executive branch, the only other president that comes even close to Trump’s degree of dislike for the agency was, of course, Barack Obama. Now, of course, the agency isn’t the only agency within the US government that is involved encountering Russian threats.

The Defense Department’s right out there, and Trump’s, directives against Defense Department have actually been more disruptive than what they have done against, the CIA, specifically the Trump effort on DEA diversity, equity and inclusion, basically the woke agenda, if you want to call it that, is something that has been around in the Defense Department before the Biden administration was actually implemented by the first Trump term as a recruiting tool to get people who are not simply white males.

We don’t know what the future of the military is going to be, but we know it’s going to be a lot more technically involved than what we have now, and we need to throw as wide of a net as possible. Trump’s words. Anyway, by trying to comply with the blizzard of anti die orders that the Trump administration has handed down since taking over the job again on the 20th of January, the military has basically stopped recruiting at anything that might be perceived as favoring anyone who isn’t a white dude, and that includes black technical universities.

So we’ve seen the possibilities for the Pentagon to do intake for people with the skill sets that we need to maintain today’s forces, much less built. Tomorrow’s basically go to zero. And, for the Russians, who have always been technically behind the Defense Department, we’re thrilled with that particular outcome. And then, of course, tying this all together requires some people in some important note.

And Donald Trump has found a doozy in Tulsi Gabbard. Now, you have to believe Gabbard falls into one of two categories. Number one, you have to believe the Russians who have publicly been calling her one of their agents for the better part of the last decade, something that U.S. intelligence has corroborated to anyone, Wolf. Listen or two, you have to look at what Gabbard has said when she’s been in or near Russia or China or Iran or Syria, where she is consistently built up a long track record of taking Anti-america fricken positions.

And that’s before you consider that DNI job that she’s taking. Is basically management job to funnel all of the intelligence that’s coming in into a single source, collaborate with the agencies to manage their output, and then inform the president, although she’s never had a management job or an intelligence job.

So either she’s a traitor or anti-American or incompetent or some combination of the three. And needless to say, the Russians are over the moon at her confirmation.

And then there’s Ukraine. Trump made it very clear in the last week that whatever negotiations are involved between the United States and Russia that he will handle personally and that the Ukrainians are not involved in the Europeans are not involved. Considering that the last time that Putin and Trump engaged in negotiations, Trump left behind his security detail, his translation team, his intelligence team, his national security team, and he walked into a room where Putin had all of those things with him.

And the Russians basically pumped Donald Trump for information for three hours and used the information they got to reshape the world over the next several years, which is one of the things that led to the Ukraine war.

Negotiating, master. Yeah. Anyway, I don’t want to prejudge the outcome of negotiations that haven’t yet started. But the other couple of things that are going on in Europe right now don’t make me particular, really, confident, has to do with Pete Haggis, who was the defense secretary. He was recently in Munich for the Munich security Conference, when all the Europeans and the Americans get together and talk about defense issues.

And he said very clearly and publicly and officially, that NATO will never admit Ukraine as a member and U.S. forces will never be on the ground in Ukraine. This is a European, not a NATO responsibility. And in doing that, he basically hewed to every demand that the Russians have made since the beginning of the war as the starting point for the American position.

I have not seen this degree of negotiating incompetence out of the American leadership since Barack Obama gave us that horrible deal with Iran. What was it ten years ago? And from a fairly similar point of view, Obama just didn’t want to deal with it. And it looks like the Trump administration just doesn’t want to deal with this.

Which brings us to the third, and perhaps the worst one, hangs up in a speech, made it very clear that not only would U.S. forces never be involved, and they would never be involved, that the Europeans were gonna have to do this themselves outside of NATO. And if the Russians attacked the European forces on Ukrainian territory, that NATO and the U.S. would not get involved in the subsequent conflict, basically abrogating article five as far as Ukraine is concerned.

And to call this a sellout is to be generous, because the United States founded NATO with the intent of guarding Western civilization from Moscow, and to say that now that the Russian forces are on the march, literally across the plains of Europe, backed up by North Koreans, no less, that, American position on the whole thing is basically met.

That Haig’s a speech was given in Munich, which is the place where the last time the West caved to a dictator, setting the stage for a larger and much more violent war than needed to happen. It is not it’s not lost on me.

And and I can tell you precisely where this will lead. I’ve got a book here that kind of dives into this about how the United States is eventually going to lose interest in NATO, and we will have a war in the plains of Europe between the Russians and the Central Europeans. Now, I had hoped over the course of the last three years that I was wrong.

But here we are. A couple things have changed. First of all, the Russian military is not nearly as capable of large scale lightning strikes as I thought it was ten years ago when I wrote that book. It’s more of a long, grinding war of attrition that’s really ugly and takes more time. And because of that, it does.

By the Central Europeans, more time to do things and to prepare, not just to rearm, for a broader conflict, but to engage in sort of technical military work that normally they wouldn’t have had the time for. And what we now need to watch for very closely is the nuclear ization of the weapon systems in Central Europe, specifically, Sweden and Finland have the capacity to go nuclear in a very short period of time, measured in weeks, if not days.

And once that happens, Ukraine, Poland and probably Romania will follow suit because this is really the only way that they can stand out if NATO forces are being completely withheld. Keep it. Keep in mind that the best forces that the Europeans have are bound up within the NATO alliance. And by saying to the Europeans that those cannot be used in Ukraine or against Russia, despite the fact that that’s the reason the alliance exists, really limits what the Europeans can do.

So they have already given significantly more financial and military aid to the Ukrainians than the Americans have. And by now, removing the best stuff from the table. We’re really getting the Europeans no choice but to play the nuke card. And once a number of countries in Central Europe do this, the Germans will be forced to consider doing themselves.

And that triggers a series of strategic entanglements that I really don’t have the brainpower to focus on right now.

I have always found it quizzical that people believe that as combative and erratic as Donald Trump is, that somehow he’s the person who’s going to usher in world peace, it is difficult to come up with a more perfect set of circumstances than what the Trump administration has set up in the last few days to trigger anything other than a horrific continental war in Europe.

But here we are, and tomorrow we’ll talk about what the Trump administration has cooking up in the Middle East.

Trump Takes on Washington

Second-time freshman President Donald J Trump is taking the axe to the federal workforce. Or at least he is attempting to. Like presidents before him Trump is discovering that America’s separation of powers does not enable a president to bypass the will of Congress or the role of the courts. Instead, he is burning through large volumes of his political capital to achieve fairly paltry results.

Does this mean the old/new president is down and out? Hardly. It just means he will have a bigger impact on people who are not protected by American laws and the American Constitution. It’s in the wider world where there is little to stop him.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hello, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to launch a series on how the Trump administration is remaking the world. Whether or not you love this or hate this may, of course, come down to how you voted. But things are afoot, and I can’t ignore them. First, first, the caveat. Donald Trump is, in a word, erratic.

So I’m doing my best here, but I am working with some information. We had four years of the firehose of chaos. That was the first Trump term, followed by his four years out of power, where he made no secrets about what he planned to do. And now we’ve got about a month of information in his second term that has been, frenetic.

I think we can all agree at this point that Donald Trump is not a long game kind of guy. What you see is what you get. So with that said, here we go. Mass firings of the federal workforce and mass disruption to the federal budget is, legally dubious at minimum.

There are legal protections built into the system established by Congress for federal workers, and there’s a process to go through to get rid of them.

And you really can’t get rid of them if you just don’t like them. It has to be something that’s more than a personal preference, or has to be some sort of cause for firing. Same goes for the budget that’s established by Congress.

The Constitution is very clear where the power of the purse is. And once Congress has established the budget and it’s been approved and then signed by the president, nonetheless, there’s some wiggle room that the executive can have and how the money is spent and distributed, but it can’t do a wholesale reshuffling.

Same goes for things like citizenship. Birthright citizenship is established by the Constitution itself. So Donald Trump’s, executive orders on all of these topics, are at best on legally questionable ground and sometimes constitutionally, questionable ground. And so we have seen any number of court cases come up already challenging the orders, most of which, at least temporarily, have been ruled against, Trump, which gives us kind of the worst of all worlds here, all the things that Trump doesn’t like aren’t functioning, but we’re still paying for them.

And for those of you that find this sounds familiar, you’re just thinking back to the first Trump term where we had four years of this. So whatever Trump did this four years when he was out of power, it did not involve, studying American legal code very much.

If your goal is to remake the federal government, especially Barry Ocracy. This is ultimately a prerogative of Congress. And so the president would need to go to the Congress re structure the laws that, created the institutions, and gave them power and, of course, budget in the first place, which means that Congress would have to cede authority over budget and, action and guidelines, to the presidency.

Now, not only is this flying directly in the face of a lot of recent court cases launched by red states against the Biden administration, but we take about a dozen acts of Congress to do this on the scale that Donald Trump indicates that he wants to, keep in mind that passing things like this through Congress don’t just require a simple majority.

You gotta get that whole 60% sure thing. And, Trump is attempting to bypass this, by using some interesting rules in the House and the Senate. But we just haven’t seen Trump go to Congress with this request yet. And until that happens, it’s in the hands of the courts. And since the courts have already started to prove that, they hold the power here, Trump is now starting to challenge the legitimacy of the courts.

And, again, case law. For over a century, congressional law for over a century. It’s very strongly against the president on this one. If you want to go back to a time when the president had more authority, you have to go back to the end of the gilded Age, which was the last time that, the population got really set up with oligarchic politics, back in the Gilded Age and before we had a race to the winner go the spoils, which basically meant that every time a new president and his new team came in, regardless of who his backers were, the president had the ability to completely remake the federal bureaucracy in whatever image he wanted. And so basically, the government started over every 4 to 8 years, and we collectively, as a country, decided that, the federal government exists to serve the people rather than the proclivities of a specific individual. And we professionalized things like the Foreign Service and the bureaucracy and all that good stuff. What Trump is seems to be trying to do is dial the clock back 130 years to what was arguably the least economically unequal time in American history in the aftermath of reconstruction.

You can do that if you want to, but that requires Congress.

Trying to go head to head with the bureaucracy without using Congress is kind of like, I don’t know, riding off against thieves without getting your posse together first. And it’s not probably going to work. Well, well, and he’s burning through a massive amount of political capital. Only one month into the job, incidentally, the last American president to take this general approach, for the same reason, trying to rein in the bureaucracy.

It was Jimmy Carter, and he failed at it. And that failure is one of the reasons that Jimmy Carter is not thought of as one of the great presidents of American history. Now, does this mean that Donald Trump has no power? No. Don’t be dumb. The US president is still the most powerful person in the country and in the world.

He has just chosen a field of combat in the specific instances where the deck is stacked against him. When you’re going up against American citizens in America, there are American laws on the American constitution that give them a leg up. But when you look at the wider world where there are not American citizens and American laws do not protect them, the American Constitution is not relevant.

Then all of a sudden, the power of the American president has is robust. And we’ll start looking at that specific situation, beginning with Russia.

Generational Divides of Other Countries

An elder woman plays basketball with a child

I’ve talked extensively about the generational divides in the US, but what about other countries? Let’s look at the unique demographic trends in Russia, China, and Iran.

We all know the US generations – Boomers to Zoomers – but that model can’t be applied everywhere. Russia is more so divided by major political events, like the Brezhnev era or the Putin era. In China, the primary divide is pre and post One-Child Policy, where instability and famine ruled before and economic boom occurred after (the younger gen now faces economic downturn, high costs, and Xi). In Iran, the main split is the 1979 Islamic Revolution, where those before and after have very different perceptions of the country, leaders, religion, and more.

The main takeaway is that each country has unique political and economic events that have shaped generational divides. While the US model helps breakdown domestic trends, we can’t use that framework for everyone.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the southern headlands of the Wanganui Inlet on the northwest coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page on, demographic specifically, that I talk about Gen-X and the boomers, the millennials and all that of the United States quite a bit. What about the generational blocks for other countries, specifically Iran, China and Russia?

There’s a little bit of a danger here because all demographic lines are a bit artificial. So the ones I use for the United States, specifically people who were born between 1946 and 1964, in the United States. Those are my boomers. These are people who were, born in the post-World War Two boom years in very large numbers.

And as they went through their childhood and adult lives, they’ve basically remade American culture in their image after them. 1965 to 1979, roughly. You have, Gen X. That’s my generation. Birthrates dropped off precipitously. One of the reasons the boomers were so many is you still had some old gender norms. By the time you get to Gen X, their parents had become a little bit more, I mean, the female revolution happened in there.

Dropped the birthrate a little bit. The suburbs had already been largely populated, dropped the birthrate a little bit, raised cost of living. Drop the birthrate a little bit, a little bit. Energy prices, all that good stuff. So Gen X until recently, was the smallest generation in American history. After that, you got the millennials born roughly 1980 until 1999.

These are the kids who had never seen or remember seen a, circular phone and basically were the generation that made the transition to a digital world. And then the Zoomers, kids who were born since 2000 are the ones who were, doing penpal emails rather than written correspondence and have never looked back. All right. Like I said, it’s a little artificial.

Whenever you’re looking to another country, you need to look at the gross economic trends, and physical conflicts that have shaped their worlds, because oftentimes you’re not going to draw the lines in the same place. So, for example, if you’re going to look at Europe, there is a boomer generation in about the same window for about the same, reasons, but because the cost of living was so much higher and because Europe is so much more urbanized.

They didn’t have a lot of kids. So American boomers had the millennials, the European boomers did not. And so the demographics just kind of fall apart after the 1960s. So you got to be careful about how many trendlines. You try to extend. So, for example, in the case of the Russians, the really definitive break is pre and post Brezhnev for when your adult life was because if you were born and had a memory of Brezhnev years, you remember how bad central planning can be and you were probably a little bit more open things like perestroika and glasnost.

But then when you get into the post-Soviet system, you got an equally bad thing to compare to. So Brezhnev, stagnation, economic doldrums, post-Cold War collapse, democracy for you probably equals chaos. And so you’ve always known that there’s or always felt in your gut that there’s a choice between stagnancy but stability and opportunity, but free fall. And it’s not a pretty choice.

But if you were born just a little bit later, then you have no political memory of life under the Soviet Union. You may remember the free fall of the 1990s, but then for the next 25 years, Vladimir Putin, despite his many, many, many flaws, has been leader. And Russia has been relatively stable from an economic point of view for that entire time, and especially if your first adult memories are post 2000.

You don’t know a life without Vladimir Putin. And yet that’s everybody under age 40 in Russia today. So it’s not really a boomer or millennial zoomer kind of thing. It’s a Brezhnev issue. It’s a Putin issue. It’s a fall of the Soviet Union issue about where you draw the lines. Now, something to keep in mind is the freshness generation was the last one to really have kids in numbers.

We had a little blip during perestroika when people thought that the Soviet Union could be reformed, but it didn’t last. And since then, the birthrate has just been awful. So the generation that has been growing up since 2000, in Russia, you know, the the millennials and the the Zoomers of Russia, if you will, are really the last generation that is going to exist and significant enough number to make anything happen in Russia.

And so what they do from their small numbers will shape a large part of a continent for the rest of the century as they die out. All right. What else? China. Hu. Okay. China. It’s a little bit simpler. It’s pretty. And post one child policy. If you’re born before the one child policy kicked in, you know, famine, you know, a lack of electricity, you know, outdoor plumbing, and you know that the world can be a very nasty place.

You also know political leadership that is murderous and mercurial. And you yearn for something better if you were post one child, not only was there a floor put under the chaos, but the internationalization of the Chinese system after Mao, generated a degree of economic opportunity that had never existed. Now, part of this is indeed policy, because it was after Mao that you got things like roads and electricity and meaningful amounts of steel and high rises and health care and all the other things that go with modern life.

But having only one child means for grandparents support, two parent support, one grandchildren and those grandchildren. The people who were born in the later decades, you know, 1990 and after, they have no nothing but an economic boom because all of the wealth of the country has been focused on industrial expansion, and there has not been a large generation from below that needs to be clothed, fed and educated.

So all of the social spending that was done in China was spent on very few people, relatively speaking, and you were one of them. So for young Chinese, it’s been glorious until the system started to break about seven years ago. And now we’ve got all the worst aspects of capitalism, things like, conspiracy theories throughout the public space, massive amounts of shell games, real estate booms and that have not yet gone bust.

Putting the money into the wrong things over investment, but no longer investment that generates growth when you do investment on the front end, when you don’t have roads or power lines, you get roads and power lines, and that’s great. But if you start with roads and power lines and you do a lot of state investment, you’re just building more roads and power lines and you only need so many of those.

So the lesson that the Japanese learned in the 1990s and 2000, the Chinese have now learned it as well. And so the Chinese need to adapt to a new economic model, but they’re still dealing with the distortions of the old capitalized, over invested system. So if you’re a 20 something Chinese citizen today, you’re of a small generation.

You hear the stories from your parents about how good things got, how fast it got, how stable it was. But everything has too much money chasing too few goods within the country, and everything is too expensive. So your chances of ever starting a family are nil. Your chances of ever being able to afford an apartment, much less a house, are almost nonexistent.

And it’s a very different political view. And if you were to put a label on it, these would be the zoomers of the Chinese system. And they are the last generation that will grow up in a centralized China, and they will definitely have some visceral memories 20, 30 years from now about how the Chinese system crashed around them.

And no one could seem to do anything because the political system is too ossified to function. Those people are going to be making some very interesting political and personal decisions as the system fails. Because if there’s anything we know about Chinese history in the past, when the center breaks, people leave if they can and a country that has at least 800 million people, that’s like the low end for estimates and maybe as many as 1.2 billion, if only 5% of them get out.

You’re still talking about the greatest migrant surges in human history. All right. That just leaves Iran. And Iran’s is even simpler. Yet it all depends upon how old you were when the Shah fell. And the mullahs took over and close to the water here. We’re going to turn around. There we go. Okay. This is just a really cool pocket beach.

I found. You practically have to repel down to it. Okay. Iran. So if you were are old enough to remember Iran as an adult before 1979. So you’re in your 60s for this category. The boomers, if you will. You remember just how corrupt the Shah was, but how there was opportunity for anyone with an education up to and including women.

And then the Shah fell and the mullahs took over. Women were disenfranchized and the intelligentsia and the engineers and everybody with a set of skills who could left the country. The people who left the country tended to have the money, and they emptied out the inner cities. Sorry. Inner cities in Iran, not the same as inner cities.

And like Chicago, you’re they emptied out the wealthier parts of Iran’s cities, took their money, took their kids, took their skill set and left. And you had a 15 year period where Iran was basically drowning and an inability to function because it didn’t have the skill set anymore. It had lost most of its educated youth, and most of the efforts the Iranian government, past and present, had made to educate another generation left the country and instead they had eight years of a grinding war with Iraq.

And after that, a series of on again, off again confrontations with the United States. Now, if you fast forward a little bit to a break point of around whole 2008, 2010, you had a shift in government with, the rise of a guy by the name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or a dog, as we used to call him at my old job, and a man at a job, was the first leader of Iran who was not a cleric since the fall of the Shah.

And he was deeply conservative, and he was deeply anti-American and anti-Western. But he wasn’t a man of the cloth. And he thought there should be room in public life for people who didn’t go to seminary, to be perfectly blunt. And so there’s now a split in Iranian society between the mullahs. On one hand, these conservatives who are, secular on the other hand, and then a wider disenfranchized group who has to basically take whatever’s on offer.

And that has made the country significantly more politically unstable. And in light of ongoing hostility with not just the United States, but the Western world in general, significantly less well off, because one of the mistakes that Ahmadinejad made is in order to get people over onto his side versus the clerics, he just bribed everybody. And so the state budget exploded, debt exploded, the currency crashed.

And then when a new round of sanctions came in and they could no longer underwrite everything, it all went to hell. Now we even have the strategic steps that the Iranians have taken to spawn paramilitary groups around the world falling apart. And so all of the money that Iran has spent on political consolidation, political evolution, education and increasingly strategic cost have all gone to nothing.

And so if you were 20, 15 years ago, for the last 15 years, your entire adult life, you have simply seen one state failure after another out of Tehran and you start to get a little pissed off. I’m not going to say anything simplistic like Iran is poised for a revolution or is ripe for change. What I’m saying is that the old pillars of stability that allow it to function don’t exist in the young adult generation, and that is a very nasty combination of factors.

Because remember when the old people who lived under the Shah left, they took the kids with them. We had a 20 year baby bust in Iran. So this younger generation is Disenfranchized is angry and is poor, relatively speaking, to Iran’s long history that that can turn violent very, very quickly, even if it doesn’t generate political change. So bottom line, there’s a generational story everywhere, but in before you can tell it, you have to really look at the local history and the economic trends that have shaped the people have grown in that areas.

It’s not going to be a cut and dried. It’s going to be different everywhere. But there is definitely lessons to learn. Okay. That’s it.

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Join 200,000+ other subscribers

Stay Social

GEOPOLITICAL INSIGHT STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX