Peter Zeihan, Author at Zeihan on Geopolitics

New Ukrainian Weapons Hit Russia Where It Hurts

Ukraine has successfully attacked several major Russian ammunition depots, with explosions detectable hundreds of miles away. These strikes suggest Ukraine’s war strategy is evolving…

There are a handful of factors contributing to the success of Ukraine’s tactics: vulnerability of Russian ammunition, Ukraine’s new missile-drone hybrid weapon and Russian rail system targeting. Combine all of these and you get a recipe for Ukrainian success.

The strategic shift we’re seeing now could pose some serious challenges for the Russians moving forward.

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

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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

Hello, everybody. It’s Peter Zeihan coming to you from a foggy Colorado. It is the 22nd of September. In the news over the last 4 or 5 days, the Ukrainians have managed to blow up a handful of major arm depots within Russian territory, some of them a couple hundred miles from the border. The three places in question are cross-border, Tow Rope Pets, and two corvettes.

Yeah, pretty sure that’s right. Anyway, one of these explosions was big enough that it was detected by seismic monitoring stations a thousand miles away, which is cool—kind of creepy. Kiloton-range explosion. We’ve got four things going on here, all of which are pretty significant, and when you put them together, it suggests a change in the tempo of the war.

The first thing to understand is that the Russians don’t move and store ammo like normal people. They don’t use forklifts, crates, or pallets; they just have things in boxes moved by hand. So, when something goes wrong—and things often do—it’s very volatile. That’s definitely what happened at all three of these facilities.

The second development is that the Ukrainians have brought a new weapon system into play. The technical term is “drone missile,” which is a bit shy of a cruise missile. The name of this system is a letter, and I’m not going to apologize for mispronouncing it because the Ukrainians chose that name specifically because it’s difficult for the Russians to pronounce—so I’m in the clear. The NSA, anyway. Its range isn’t nearly as good as some of the drones the Ukrainians have been fielding over the course of the summer.

Some of these drones have hit targets a thousand miles from the front, but these probably have a range of no more than 300 miles. However, because it’s a missile instead of a drone, it flies much faster, is much harder to intercept, and can carry a much heavier payload. The bigger Ukrainian drones can carry warheads about 75 pounds, with most of them carrying a third of that. But these new missiles likely have warheads 2 to 5 times as large. I say “likely” because they’re new, and last week was the first time we saw them in action. That said, they’re being used in large numbers—specifically in the attack on Tow Rope Pets, which involved at least 100 of these missiles. This is not just a case of 1 or 2 missiles being launched; entire fleets are now in play. For their debut, that’s pretty impressive from a manufacturing point of view, leaving aside logistics and military planning.

The third issue is that Russia, when it moves cargo more than the final mile, usually relies on rail. Russian territory is vast, and the value of agricultural land in Russia is low. Precipitation is fickle, and the summer season is short, so the amount of income Russian land can generate for the state per square mile is very low. Of the major agricultural zones in the world, Russia’s is by far the lowest in terms of income generated.

This means the Russians can’t afford a normal transport method like having a road network that individual farmers can always access. They simply don’t have the income necessary to build or maintain such a network, so they need something more cost-effective—hence, rail. About 90% of what moves in Russia, whether it’s barrels of oil, bushels of grain, or stacks of ammo canisters, moves by rail. It’s only in the final mile that cargo is moved by hand or maybe by civilian car if it’s a military asset. This system has lots of vulnerabilities, but it’s hard to target trains because rail networks are difficult to disrupt long-term. If a rail line gets blown up, you just lay new track.

In the recent attack, it appears that a train was present, unloading ammo at the time, and it was hit, causing the entire depot to explode. I must emphasize that I’m using local Russian reporting, so take it with a grain of salt. But usually, the Russians don’t celebrate their own trains and ammo dumps getting blown up. “Celebrate” is the wrong word, but you get the point. Unless this was an amazing coincidence, it suggests the Ukrainians have found a way to track Russian rail movements in real-time.

There’s reason to think this is true because a few weeks ago, the Ukrainians attacked Russia to the north and took over large portions of the Kursk province, including a rail depot at a place called Susa. If this allowed the Ukrainians to tap into or hack the Russian rail network, they could now know the schedules and locations of Russian locomotives and what they’re carrying. If they’re carrying ammo and heading to a warehouse full of more ammo, well, that’s a target-rich environment for the Ukrainians. So, we should expect more of these kinds of attacks.

Which brings us to the fourth and final issue: a potential change in targeting. If the Ukrainians do have better intel on the rail system and now have these faster, more lethal, mass-produced missile drones, the logical next step is to target Russia’s power generation and distribution systems. Unlike in the U.S., where half of our cargo by ton-mile is moved by truck, rail is critical in Russia, and two-thirds of Russia’s locomotives are electric. If Ukraine can disrupt the electricity system, the entire Russian transport system could fall apart.

We may already be seeing early stages of this. We know the Ukrainians have used drones to attack power centers in Crimea, though it felt like a test run—there weren’t many drones involved. But if they now have better intel on rail systems and weapons to hit ammo and transport networks, we’ll likely see much more activity within 150 miles of Ukraine’s borders to the north, northeast, and east.

We’ve seen Russian counteroffensives in places like Kursk peter out in the last 72 hours, as well as in the Donbas, where Russian forces were on the verge of capturing a Ukrainian rail network at Borowski. The Russians had been making steady progress toward this goal for months, ever since they captured the fortress city of Avdiivka. They got within 5 or 6 miles of Borowski, and if they had taken it, Ukraine’s ability to move forces along the front would’ve been crippled. But the assault stopped, likely due to the kind of attacks I’ve just described.

This is bad for Russia in the short, mid, and long term. It affects their ability to reach the front, let alone supply it. Remember, the Russian military doesn’t operate on quality—it’s all about throwing huge numbers of troops and shells at the enemy and incrementally advancing. You can’t do that without a robust rail network, and the Ukrainians may have just found a way to strike at its heart.

Immigration: Social Costs vs. Economic Benefits

Its easy to sit up in an ivory tower and say immigration is always good because of the economic benefits; however, turning a blind eye to the social implications of immigration would be irresponsible in a well-rounded discussion. Here’s what Canada and Germany have going on:

Canada jumped on the immigration train fairly early in order to counteract their demographic decline. This influx of young immigrants helped stabilize the population, boosted labor productivity, and brought in more taxes than it cost in benefits. Butttt Canada’s social fabric is rapidly changing due to this new (and growing) population of immigrants.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Germany and they’re not exactly known for their history of immigration. Over the past few years, the Germans have brought in large numbers of refugees from places like Bosnia, Syria and Ukraine. That has created some hefty social challenges, which will only continue to grow as Germany must bring in millions of young immigrants annually to balance its demographics.

While there is a strong economic case for immigration, we must also consider the social and political costs that it comes with. No amount of money can make a round peg fit in a square hole…

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

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the top of the Grand Canyon of the 12. I’m in Yosemite, just below Glen Allen. This is where I’m going to be hiking for the next couple of days. Not bad!

Today, we are taking an entry from the Ask Peter Forum, and the question is: Could you go through the numbers on the pros and cons of mass immigration into countries, specifically like Canada and Germany?

People always talk about the economic upside and the tax benefits, but they rarely mention the downsides, like crime and social identity. It’s a reasonable question, especially as we see more and more countries aging. Since we have more nations basically aging out, immigration is often brought up as one of the few, if not the only, possible patches or even solutions.

Let’s start by saying Canada is a special case. Canada knew 30 years ago that they were headed for a German-style demographic implosion. Under the Harper government and later under the Trudeau government, they made the decision to open the floodgates and become an immigrant country. You’ve probably had, I mean, they didn’t count the statistics the same way we do in the United States, but roughly 3 to 4 million immigrants have come in and become Canadians during that period.

Most of these immigrants were in their 20s and 30s, as Canada specifically targeted younger people, unlike the migrants they had received in earlier years. This managed to stabilize the numbers, but only so long as they keep those inflows coming, because native Canadians, to use a church term, still have a very, very low birth rate. There’s no replacement coming from within the population, so a new social fabric is developing.

The numbers, which I don’t have top of mind, I apologize, are unequivocal: the new migrants, especially those under age 40, generate far more in tax payments than they take out over their lifetime. It’s a definite net fiscal benefit. In terms of jobs, as a rule, the people who migrate tend to be the more aggressive, skilled, and educated of their countrymen. This gives you a boost in labor productivity. Not everyone is an Elon Musk, but you get the idea.

Third is crime. Unequivocal data shows that in every country that tracks these statistics, crime committed by immigrants is significantly lower—typically at least a third lower—than crime committed by the native-born population.

Fourth, there’s something people usually don’t think about: education. In the United States, it costs over $150,000 to graduate a kid from high school. That’s just the government cost for education, not the societal cost of raising the child from birth to age 18, including healthcare. One of the benefits of migrants is that, you know, another country has already paid those costs, and now you’re benefiting from their labor. Economically, it’s a very easy case to make.

Two things to keep in mind. Number one: not all migrants are the same. Take the United Kingdom, for example. Indian migrants and family reunification—basically, the UK would bring in one person from India who meets all of these criteria we’ve discussed. But then they bring in their extended family, and all of a sudden you’ve got 60 Indian Brits, half of whom are over 60. It’s a different story if you’re bringing in new retirees; the cost to society can be very, very high.

Also, in the German case, the migrants from Syria—about a million of them—were 80–90% male. So, you’re not getting much of a demographic boost there because there weren’t enough women to have more children.

The second complicating factor is social cohesion. If immigration has been a part of your social fabric for decades or even centuries, absorbing people from different places is relatively easy. Countries like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have done this in phases for a long time, so if someone says their parents are from a different country, most Americans won’t even blink. People in the U.S. assimilate very quickly.

But if your country doesn’t have that culture, like Germany, and you suddenly open the floodgates, things start to look very different. The first real wave of migration into Germany happened during the Bosnian wars in the 1990s. Germany did the right thing for the right reason by taking in refugees, but it changed the social character of the country. They did it again in the 2000s with Syrians, and now they’re doing it with Ukrainians. If you wait too long, until there are more people in their 40s than in their 30s, 20s, 10s, or even newborns, you’ll end up with a very different place.

This is the situation that Canada will face—not right now, but in 20 or 30 years. They waited until late in the day to start bringing in millions of people. If it happens over a long enough period, society can adapt. But in Germany’s case, this has all happened relatively quickly. To maintain their demographic standing, Germany may have to bring in 2 to 2.5 million people under age 30 every year for the next 20 years, just to stay where they are. By then, those people will form the majority of the country, which will make it a very different place.

If you look at immigration purely as a numbers game, a fiscal issue, or an economic growth issue, it’s a slam-dunk case. But we don’t live in that world. And you know what we call the gap between the ideal and reality? Politics.

Why You Should Ditch Your Pager (Hezbollah Operative Edition)

If your pocket starts to feel warm in the coming days, here’s a few questions you should ask yourself. #1 – Are you trapped in the 80s? #2 – Are you affiliated with any terrorist organizations? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you should probably throw your pager away…but hopefully all of my readers ditched their pagers before Bush Senior left office.

If you haven’t heard by now, a sophisticated Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon was carried out on September 17. While Israel has not officially claimed this attack, it appears to be the next chapter in the rising tensions between Israel and Hezbollah.

Israel’s operation involved intercepting pagers somewhere along Hezbollah’s supply chain, implanting explosives, and then returning those devices to the supply chain to eventually end up in the hands of Hezbollah operatives. Those devices were then detonated earlier this week. Hezbollah has evolved into a political and militant power within Lebanon, so they’ve somewhat limited conflict with Israel to help maintain their political footholds.

This attack resulted in a number of casualties among Hezbollah and also provided the Israeli’s with a strategic understanding of who is involved with the organization. As of now, I don’t expect this to escalate into a broader conflict.

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

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, I’m recording this on the 18th. Yesterday, the 17th of September, we had several thousand pagers explode in Lebanon, injuring at least 2,800 people and killing at least 12. This was undoubtedly an Israeli operation. The Israelis aren’t saying anything about it, but no one else would, and no one else has a vested interest in doing this.

The target was Hezbollah, which is a militant/political organization in Lebanon that the Israelis have been dealing with over the last several months, and vice versa.

Okay, so what’s going on?

Number one, Hezbollah is not new. It’s been around for decades. Israel is not new. It’s been around for decades. Basically, since Hezbollah’s formation—it’s been around for 40, 50, 60 years—they’ve always been involved in conflict with Israel. However, things have evolved over the last 15 years in a more peaceful direction. The two haven’t come to direct blows since a brief air war in the early 2000s. The reason is very simple: Hezbollah is not a typical terrorist organization. They also have a political wing that is part of the government in Lebanon.

There’s a whole class of people in Hezbollah who don’t see a vested interest in firing rockets into northern Israel because they are now part of the power structure. If you challenge Israel in a way that makes them feel the tanks need to move, there’s nobody in the neighborhood who can stand up to them. So, you get this hybridized organization where there’s a militant wing and a political wing.

I’m not suggesting any of them are nice people, but not everyone wants to have a war. In fact, even on the militant side, in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks last year, Hezbollah knows they are fortunate that Israel has its hands full with a suppression operation in Gaza. The danger, of course, is that everyone in the Middle East always wants the last word.

Both sides—Israel and Hezbollah—have been doing attacks on each other, just like the Iranians, in order to get the last word. But since no one will let anyone else have the last word, we keep having these layered attacks that escalate, settle down, escalate again, and so on.

I have no reason to believe that this is any different. I don’t think it’s going to lead to a general war, but Hezbollah will feel like it has to respond, and then Israel will feel like it has to respond, which will make Hezbollah feel like it has to respond. Welcome to the Middle East. This is just what the place looks like on a good day.

This does not change my assessment that the Middle East is still the most volatile part of the world and has been for a little over two years now.

Now, what about this attack specifically?

Well, a few things. First of all, this is clearly against international law—using a civilian network, the telephone network, to trigger civilian devices (pagers) in civilian areas of Lebanon is clearly not legal. But because Hezbollah has a militant wing and has been launching missiles and rockets into Israel, I really don’t see anyone who matters bringing a court case against the Israelis for this one. So that’s kind of a minor sideshow issue.

Far more important: this was a pretty sophisticated attack. The Israelis have had a lot of intelligence failures over the last few years. They completely missed the Gaza operation, and they’re botching their counterattacks into Gaza now. This should have been done months ago, and they’re making no appreciable progress. They’ve had to go back over areas they’ve already cleared, over and over again. This has the makings of a quagmire operation for them.

Now, let me explain how this attack likely happened. The pagers were manufactured in Taiwan. They were shipped to Hungary, where a Hungarian company’s distribution system took over. Somewhere between Taiwan and Hungary—and these things being delivered to Hezbollah—the Israelis got a hold of the shipments and implanted explosives in them. Probably what they did was swap out the batteries and replace them with a hybrid battery-explosive system.

There’s no way to remotely hack a pager and turn it into a bomb. Sorry. The most a pager would do is get really hot if tampered with. So, the sophistication to do that without anyone noticing, and getting it into thousands of people’s hands, is kind of impressive.

There’s also the operational aspect. Hezbollah uses pagers because cell phones can be easily tracked if you know what you’re doing. Pagers only send a signal when they’re on, so they’re a much simpler technology but safer if you’re trying to avoid having the Israelis drop a bomb on your head. Well, the Israelis have now hit a couple thousand people who were part of the Hezbollah supply chain and distribution system.

It’s not like everyone who has a pager in Lebanon got hit—just the people who had gotten pagers from Hezbollah. The vast majority, if not all, of them were affiliated with the organization in an operative way. So, the next step here is that the Israelis undoubtedly had observers in hospitals across Lebanon. They’ve either confirmed or identified hundreds, if not thousands, of Hezbollah agents and operatives. That’s a rich intelligence trove. It doesn’t get much better than that. Not to mention, a lot of these guys are going to have holes in their thighs and will be easy to identify after they heal because they’ll be limping for the rest of their lives.

You’ve got to give credit where it’s due—that was a brilliant operation.

Finally, it raises the question of what else the Israeli intelligence services have been up to. After those recent intelligence failures, there was an open question as to whether or not Israel had lost its mojo. Clearly, at least some people in their intelligence services have not. If they can interrupt a supply chain of pagers, what else can they do?

Manufactured goods in Lebanon—everything is imported. So, that’s an opportunity for the Israelis to reach out and tackle anything that Hezbollah might have an independent supply system for.

Today, on the 18th, we found a second wave—walkie-talkies, something else that is hard to hack—that exploded and probably injured another 300 people. Now you’ve got a bunch of Hezbollah folks walking around missing fingers. The Israelis are not done here, and Hezbollah will react, but we have seen a level of sophistication in Israel today and yesterday that we just haven’t seen in the last few years.

Whether they’re doing this because they have some broader plans or whether this is just the most recent tit-for-tat, I don’t have an answer for you. But what I can tell you is that operationally, Hezbollah has now been marked, and a more traditional assassination campaign would be so much easier than it was just three days ago.

The Future of Saudi Arabia

A photo of Saudi Arabian traffic against a desert skyline

The US has become largely self-sufficient when it comes to oil, and it was never really reliant upon Saudi oil in the first place. Back in the day, the US formed a relationship with Saudi Arabia not for itself, but instead to provide US allies with oil during globalization. Times are changing and so is this relationship, so what does the future of Saudi Arabia look like?

The US is largely pulling out of the Middle East and turning its focus back towards home and East Asia. That means American strategic interests in the Middle East have nowhere to go but down.

Without a real need to maintain an active relationship, US-Saudi relations will likely fade, exposing Saudi Arabia to a…colorful neighborhood. It doesn’t take much to imagine a strategic mishap in which the Saudis lose control of their oil fields.

The current external security guarantees aren’t working for the Saudis and they don’t have many great prospects. China’s navy lacks the range to help out Riyadh, Japan remains (mostly) pacifist, and European powers just don’t make a ton of sense. Turkey is the only real option, and not even a great one at that due to Turkey’s strength and “history” of ruling the region.

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

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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

Morning, everyone. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Waterfall Camp just above the Merced Canyon. That’s the one that stretches pretty much the entire length of the North Country and ends up down in Yellowstone Valley. Today, we’re going to take an entry from the Ask Peter forum about the Middle East—specifically, the Persian Gulf. What’s the future of relations between the United States and the countries in the region, specifically the Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia?

Well, if you’re an Arab in the Persian Gulf, the news isn’t great. During globalization, the United States needed oil from the Persian Gulf—not for itself, but for its allies. Everyone from Japan to China, to Korea, to Taiwan, to France, Germany, Italy, and Britain. These were countries that did not have sufficient oil capacity for themselves. To induce them to join the global order and the Cold War against the Soviet Union, part of the deal was that the U.S. would keep them fueled. They wouldn’t need a navy to get the oil themselves—the U.S. would take care of that. So, the oil was for the U.S., but not directly. The United States has always gotten most of its oil from within North America, and to a lesser degree, from countries like Venezuela, with a little bit from Africa. We never got more than maybe 20% of our crude from the Middle East at all.

Well, as the shale revolution kicked in, the volumes of crude that the United States got from the Middle East basically dropped to zero. The Saudis got into the habit of parking supertankers off the coast of Louisiana, waiting for them to be needed. And after a while, when it turned out that they weren’t needed anymore, those stopped altogether. In addition, the stuff from Africa went away, Venezuela committed national suicide, and now the United States, plus Canada, is pretty much self-sufficient. There are some rounding errors and caveats in that statement, but that’s kind of the core position.

In the shift through Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the United States became far more disengaged from the world. We went from having a carrier, maybe two carriers at a time, in the Persian Gulf, to now really never having one there unless something is flaring up. This reflects the shift of strategic priorities. The U.S. is far more concerned with things at home, and then, to a lesser degree, what’s going on in East Asia.

For example, when the Kuwaitis discovered a big oil field offshore last month, the Americans were like, “Whatever.” Kuwait can’t develop that itself—Kuwait has no offshore capability. Maybe some of our firms will be involved, but with the security guarantees gone, it’s a different game.

Then there’s Saudi Arabia, which is, of course, the big one. The Saudis are a little cocky because they control the holy sites and claim to control the religion of Islam, or at least speak for it. That is, of course, a hotly contested topic in the region. But the United States has bent over backwards for the last 75 years to keep the Saudis happy because that was the single biggest play in the region for crude. If you could get the Saudis on board, you could pretty much guarantee that the Kuwaitis, Emiratis, and Qataris would join as well. And then you’d have everything you needed.

That doesn’t necessarily play in a post-globalized world. In a world where the U.S. is self-sufficient in energy and has sufficient exports to supply a handful of choice allies, the U.S. actually enters into the role of a disruptor. Reliable energy supplies on a global scale are no longer perceived as a strategic necessity. Once that happens, the U.S. goes from being the greatest guarantor of security the world has ever known to something closer to the opposite. When that happens, the relationship with Saudi Arabia will absolutely tank.

The Saudis can barely operate some of their easier fields. They need a huge army of expats to keep everything going. Simply denying them the staff would be enough to cripple production. More likely, however, all of the oil is exported through just a few terminals, and the Saudis don’t have a navy worth mentioning. So, if you take the world’s greatest naval power against a desert power without much military…you do the math.

I’m not saying the U.S. is going to conquer Saudi Arabia—there’s no point in that. But embargo, destroy some offshore loading facilities, or grab tankers as they leave—these are all options for the future. At that point, if we don’t want the oil and we don’t want someone else to have the oil, Saudi Arabia becomes just a country living in the desert.

Have you seen Syriana? It kind of sums it up. How did Matt Damon put it? The view of the business community is that people in your country were living in tents in the desert a century ago, beheading one another, and you’re going to be doing that again this century? That’s pretty much where we are when it comes to American views of this region. Take away the oil, and all that’s left is a penchant for domestic violence that we don’t particularly like either. So, that relationship is going to break in time. But “in time” is the key word. We’re not there yet.

As the Biden administration has shown over the last two or three years, there’s still a need for an alliance structure to achieve certain things, most notably in the Ukraine war. Also, in terms of boxing China in and semiconductors. As long as the U.S. perceives value in its alliance structure, there’s value in keeping crude flowing unimpeded from the Persian Gulf. But we should be preparing for a middle ground between completely cutting them loose and tolerating them.

In the middle, we would force this region, by hook or crook, to be a little more selective in where they sell their crude. Should things with China ever escalate to the point of shooting, which I don’t anticipate but can’t rule out, one of the first things the U.S. would do is put a few ships in the Strait of Hormuz and make sure crude can’t get to China at all. That would shut down the entire place within three months. That’s a very different relationship from what we have now, but it’s something to think about.

One more thing. Oh, yeah—Lewis Canyon. We have to look at this from the Saudi point of view. The Saudi position has always been that, since they sit on the world’s largest exploitable deposit of oil, they should just be able to pay people to defend them and their beliefs. Right up until the Iraq War in 2003, the United States was basically a bunch of mercenaries. The Saudis thought, “We’ll buy a bunch of their equipment, shrink-wrap it, put it in air-conditioned warehouses, and when we want them to fight our wars, we’ll call up the American press and they’ll do it.”

They didn’t think the Iraq War was a good idea, but it happened anyway. They were violently disabused of their position in the world. As the U.S. steps back, the Saudis are going to need a different security guarantor, and there aren’t many candidates. It’s got to be someone with a blue-water navy who can deploy over long distances—or march to Saudi Arabia.

The problem is, there are really only four options. China doesn’t have the range. Japan does, but they haven’t moved far enough past their pacifist position to invest in an army. It looks like the U.S. and Japan are settling for cooperation over the Pacific, which includes energy security for Japan. So, that probably doesn’t work. Next up are the Brits and the French. The UAE has already gotten into bed with the French, and there’s already military cooperation from their base in the UAE. But the Saudis would really rather not go with Europeans.

The only other option is Turkey. Turkey wouldn’t need a naval force to sail around the Arabian Peninsula to get to the Persian Gulf—they’d just have to march through Iraq directly to Riyadh. But that would generate the one thing Saudi Arabia doesn’t want: a superior military power with easy access to everything Saudi. Because if you’re Turkey in that scenario, why in the world would you defend Saudi Arabia and not just take it over?

Hurricanes in the Gulf, Offshore Oil and the Energy Sector

The most recent hurricane that tore through the Gulf of Mexico has sent ripples through the insurance industry thanks to all the property damage, but what will its impact on the energy sector look like?

The US has become a net exporter of refined products, moving over 4 million barrels per day. The shale revolution made this achievement possible, and in the process, helped to move most energy production onshore. So, when Hurricane Francine ripped through the Gulf, its impact on the energy sector was minimal.

Offshore production in the Gulf of Mexico only accounts for about 5% of US production. To minimize the impact even further, shale producers can easily compensate for any temporary loss in offshore ouput. Shale is king, and offshore production just isn’t really needed…but at least future generations can tap into the Gulf reserves should they need it.

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

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Cove Bay in Barbados. It occurred to me that, the Gulf of Mexico just got hit by a hurricane. And I wanted to tell you why it doesn’t really matter. Well, I mean, it does matter. You do property damage, especially in an era of rising sea levels and bigger hurricanes. Obviously, that has an insurance application that hits us all because insurance companies then have to make up for it either by higher premiums or by charging everybody else more for insurance.

So it does ripple through the system. But from an energy point of view, it doesn’t really matter. The United States is no longer simply energy independent. We are now a net exporter of over 4 million barrels per day, not of crude, of refined product. And that puts the United States into a category that no other country has ever been in terms of being an energy power.

Now, the Gulf of Mexico used to be one of our major energy things. And back when I was working at Stratfor in the Arts, part of my job was to basically chronicle how much stuff went off, like how long I would stay offline, and that gave us price increases that would last not for days or weeks, but months or even a couple of years.

Sometimes because it took a long time to repair the damage, to go out and untangle, what happened on the seabed with the pipelines? It was it was expensive, was laborious, and we would feel it for a long time. Not anymore. One of the many weird things about the shale revolution is that all of the production sites are onshore, and unless you get so much rain that everything floods in your field, you’re talking about a time to bring them back on that if it goes off it at all is measured in days and you can bring on a completely fresh well in the weeks.

So we have seen the price argument and the national security argument for energy production in the offshore Gulf of Mexico dwindle and dwindle and dwindle. And so even though the most recent hurricane just plowed through some of the best production real estate the Gulf of Mexico has, it only took off somewhere between 650 and 750,000 barrels per day, which not that is an insignificant amount, but United States, if you include things like, associate production from natural gas liquids and condensate, we now produce close to 20 million barrels a day.

So you’re talking about less than a 5% reduction. And the shale guys are already spinning up their drills to bring more production on line to displace it. And it’ll be weeks to months before the offshore producers can even pretend to catch up. The price structure just has changed so dramatically. For natural gas, it’s actually even a little bit better.

We’re talking about 750,000,000 cubic feet per day. That is right around one 1.5% of U.S natural gas production. So we’ll barely feel that outside of the local markets at all. And same thing. The shale guys are going up to gas wells to supplant it. So think of it this way. If you’re in the Gulf, you are now the piggy bank.

Should anything go drastically wrong with U.S shale production, the reserves in the Gulf will be there for another generation, but it’s probably going to be another generation or two before that’s all relevant. All right, that’s it for me. Take care.

Photo credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What Does the Future Hold for Taiwan and Semiconductors?

Taiwan has positioned itself as the dominant player in the semiconductor industry, but what would happen if a conflict with China broke out? Well, if semiconductor supply chain vulnerabilities are top of mind, than sure, this should be of concern (but you should also be worried about the thousands of companies and locations that are nowhere near Taiwan that make up the vast bulk of the supply chain).

Let’s move past those concerns for today and break down what Taiwan and companies like TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited) have planned for the future. We’ve seen Taiwan “cooperating” with the US and Japan in recent years, but what’s going on?

The Trump administration demanded that TSMC build the best facility they possibly could in the United States, and it is…not happening. Taiwan’s efforts in the US are little more than a kabuki effort to appease the US and maintain its favor. In contrast, new fabs in Japan are moving along swimmingly, as the Japanese didn’t insist upon the cutting-edge technology that the US wanted.

While the US has companies like Intel trying to replicate (and surpass) the advanced semiconductor technology of Taiwan, progress is difficult and I wouldn’t expect anything to come of it soon in the next year or two. Taiwan understands perfectly the situation that it is in and is playing its cards very strategically.

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First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the southern rim of Upper Lyle Canyon in Yosemite. Last time I was here, I hiked all the way up that. Whoo! That was exhausting. We’re just going to look at it from a distance this time. Anyway, today we’re gonna take another entry from the Ask Peter forum.

It’s about Taiwan and semiconductors. And the question is, why would Taiwan help relocate any facilities to the United States? Isn’t that kind of their guarantee that the United States will come to defend them if there’s a conflict with China? The short version is: not really. Two things going on here.

Number one, never, ever, ever, ever, ever forget that the semiconductor supply chain involves over 9,000 companies, half of which only produce one product for one end user. So, Taiwan isn’t necessarily a strong point in the international supply chain for semiconductors, but there are literally thousands of others. All these companies make products that ultimately end up in TSMC’s hands, which they use to build and operate the fabrication facilities, and, of course, fabricate the wafers and the semiconductors themselves. So you can have any number—literally thousands—of problems around the world that shut this whole thing down.

And while Taiwan is certainly a node that is the single most important one, it’s hardly the only one. The lasers come from California. The lenses come from Germany. The designs typically come from the United States. The silicon itself comes from North Carolina. It is diversified in that it’s everywhere, but it is not diversified in the fact that there are any backup plans.

So, if there was a war in Taiwan, I’m not suggesting the United States would or wouldn’t get involved. I’m saying it wouldn’t matter, because if we’re at that point, then the elements of the supply chain that are elsewhere in East Asia go offline. So, intervening in that war doesn’t solve this particular problem. The second issue is that Taiwan is not stupid.

Taiwan is building fabrication facilities in the United States in order to please the United States. But, as with everyone who cut a deal with Donald Trump, they kind of pulled the wool over his eyes. They basically flattered him and said, yes, we’ll build a semiconductor fabrication facility in Phoenix. It’ll build sub-three nanometer chips, which were, at the time, the best in the world.

What they neglected to say is they weren’t going to provide blueprints. And so, that facility has now been under construction for a few years. It’s making no progress. In fact, they’ve had to tear down many of the facilities and rebuild them from scratch because the Taiwanese are flat-out stalling. Similar things happened in a number of things that had to do with economic deals.

For example, supposedly TSMC was going to build a facility in Wisconsin. That came to nothing.

If the United States is going to establish an alternative supply to Taiwan, it obviously has to build the fabrication facilities. And the leading candidate for that right now is Intel. Intel is absorbing some new technology from the Dutch lithography company ASML, which is actually more advanced than what the Taiwanese are using.

They’re hoping, hoping, hoping, hoping to have that online in Columbus, Ohio, within a couple of years. And if, if, if, if, if that works, we’re talking about Intel not simply being able to match the technological level of TSMC, but maybe leapfrogging it a little bit. Best-case scenario, we are not going to see the first wafers out of that facility for two years.

I think four is probably a little bit more realistic. And those won’t be the one-nanometer chips that Intel has started discussing, although the new technology does look very promising. It’s just that these things take a long time to set up—years. And while Intel has made some great progress, their track record for doing things ahead of schedule is almost nonexistent.

I have no doubt they’ll get there, but they’re not going to get there this year, or next year, or probably the year after.

The alternative for TSMC is to also ingratiate themselves with other partners. After the United States, the single most important one is, by far, Japan. And they have started building fabrication facilities in Japan that are ahead of schedule, unlike the Phoenix facility, because Japan didn’t ask for the cutting-edge stuff. They just asked for stuff that would help with their automotive industry.

So, you’re talking about chips that are poorer quality than 10 nanometers, which is kind of a threshold for the really, really good stuff. So, that facility doesn’t threaten TSMC’s business model. It allows them to solidify their strategic alliance with Japan. And Japan, of course, has the second most powerful navy in the world. So, if there is a Taiwan war, Japan will probably actually be there before the United States.

So, sound decision-making from the Taiwanese on both deals: with the United States, which they are reneging on, and with the Japanese, which they are not. The end.

The Self-Inflicted Downfall of Mexican Energy

Following its discovery in the 70s, the Cantarell oil field enabled Mexico to become a major oil producer. Decades of lax management and complacency by Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, together with the declining output of the Cantarell, has left the country with serious production problems.

President López Obrador has attempted to revive Mexico’s energy sector with heavy investments into refineries like the one in Tabasco. Unfortunately, Pemex’s inefficiency led to budget issues which delayed the project even further. It could be too little, too late for the Mexican energy sector.

To add insult to injury, Mexico’s preexisting refineries were designed to process Mexico’s own heavy, sour crude, not the light, sweet stuff coming from the US. So, even if the US wanted to send some crude Mexico’s way, it would be futile. If Mexico continues down this path, they’ll be forced to import refined US oil or rely on unstable regions for crude that matches their refineries’ needs. Either way, this dependency would cause major economic and political challenges.

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

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from lower Ottaway Lake in southern Yosemite. And today, we’re gonna talk about Mexican energy. The story begins over a century ago, when there was a discovery called the Cantrell field offshore Mexico. And the Cantrell is unique among oil fields. It’s basically shaped like a volcano, with the tip at the very top and the pressure pushing all the oil towards the tip.

So, basically, they were able to put just a handful of offshore production platforms above that tip. You can see all the platforms from one another, and the pressure just continued to flow and flow and launch, flow and flow. It made Mexico a major oil producer and a significant exporter and supplier to the United States. However, one of the threads in Mexican politics is a degree of anti-Americanism, largely because the United States is the closest to the North, and it can get a little bit bossy.

So, the Mexicans actually put into their constitution that no energy asset could be operated or owned by a foreign entity. So Pemex, which is a state oil company in Mexico, was in charge of everything. Well, when you exist in that sort of controlled environment, you tend to get a little sloppy, especially when the oil comes easy. So, decades turn into decades turn into decades, and eventually, the Cantrell starts to give out.

Pemex never really bothered to learn how to explore or produce more difficult fields. And so, for the last 30 years, we’ve seen Cantrell basically fall to almost nothing, and Mexican oil production fall with it. While this is going on, Mexico is rapidly industrializing because of NAFTA, so its fuel needs have gone up. They finally loosened up some of the restrictions a little bit and allowed the import of refined products so that, you know, cars could run. Mexico is now the single largest consumer of American-exported fuels, courtesy of the shale revolution.

Well, in comes the president, Lopez Obrador, who is more anti-American than most Mexican politicians and decided that this was a bad idea. So he started splurging money on a refinery in his home state of Tabasco to make it so that Mexico wouldn’t have to import refined product. Pemex, being as incompetent as it is, saw the project go hugely over budget.

It’s operational now. But here’s the problem: Pemex can really only focus on one thing at a time, and they don’t really do the one thing all that well. So yes, they now have the refinery starting up, but oil production is tanking to the point that, very, very soon—probably within 2 or 3 years—it’s going to fall below the level that Mexico needs to supply its own needs.

So yes, they can refine, but they can’t produce the crude. The problem is, this isn’t something where they can just turn to American fuels. The new problem is American oil is primarily light and sweet, coming from the shale fields. Basically, shale fields are kind of like concrete, and there are little pockets of petroleum trapped in between the individual particles of the rock.

That’s why you have to frack it. You basically spider up the entire thing with cracks, and then the stuff can get out. The Cantrell field and most Mexican fields are much more traditional in comparison, so the oil can migrate through the rock strata. Well, for shale, this means there are fewer contaminants in it, which is the whole light sweet thing. Mexican crude is more heavy and more sour.

The Tabasco refinery, along with all of Mexico’s refineries, were designed to run on Mexican crude. So if they end up having to import oil in order to make their own refined product, it’s not going to be U.S. shale crude. They’d have to completely overhaul the refineries for that. Mexico has now become the one country in the Western Hemisphere that might actually be dependent upon oil politics of the Eastern Hemisphere. For the United States, which is slowly retooling all of its refineries to run on its own crude, this has become a bit of a headache, but one that can be dealt with, especially since

the United States has the capital to change its refineries to run on its own crude. Mexico doesn’t have that kind of resources, so we’re probably going to be getting to a situation within a decade when Eastern hemispheric energy flows are interrupted. The United States is fine—in fact, is doing great—but Mexico is either going to have to shut down its own refineries and then bring in American refined product again, or be subject to a crazy price environment that is subject to things like Russian shutdowns and more wars in the Middle East.

Mexico has, unfortunately, found a way to make itself far more exposed than it needs to be because of nationalism. How they deal with that? Well, only time will tell.

Will the Far-Right Take Over Germany (Again)?

German regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia saw some of the country’s far-right parties, including the Alternative for Germany, perform quite well. Don’t sound the alarm bells yet, but this is yet another reminder of the ongoing economic and political issues in Germany.

While these far-right groups saw some success in these elections, they aren’t likely to form coalitions or gain significant power. The current government, a coalition between Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats led by Olaf Scholz, will likely remain in power through the next general elections.

Dissatisfaction amongst the Germans is growing, especially within East Germany, and for good reason. The government struggles to make decisions and can’t get aligned on anything; combine that with all the other issues facing Germany and we can expect some eventful elections come September of 2025.

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

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Germany. I’m not in Germany. I’m in Colorado. We’re going to talk about Germany. Jeez. Sorry. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. Let’s see, where were we? We’re in around the turn of August. In September, the Germans had regional elections. And in two states, specifically Saxony and Thuringia, which are provinces in the former East Germany.

So, provinces that have not done well these last 30 years. The far right did very well. Two parties, or with call out, the AfD, which is the alternative for Germany. And then literally a splinter party ran by a Czech who put her name as the party name with the, you know, ego. I’m not going to bother repeating her name because she’s a flash in the pan.

Anyway, did very well. The largest or second largest parties, and a few people are freaking out, especially in Germany, when the Germans tend to elect people that are basically, you know, less organized Nazis, it’s worth paying attention. I don’t want to belittle this, but I’m not too worried. Number one, no one’s going to work with them to build a coalition, so they’re not going to take over the state governments or the land or governments, if you want to use the technical term.

But it is an indication of two things. Number one, the integration of the former East Germany into the former West Germany, into what we now consider to be the Federal Republic of Germany. It’s been a tough row to hoe. Basically, the former East Germany was the economic success story of the former Soviet Union. But when it was integrated with Germany, which was one of the most advanced economies in the world, every piece of infrastructure they had was absolutely crap.

And they made a decision, for political reasons, to allow anyone in the East Germany to relocate anywhere in Germany right away, which, you know, is kind of important. You needed to do that from a national unity point of view. But it meant that anyone who had talent in the former East Germany picked up and moved to Bonn or Munich or somewhere else, tripled their income overnight and never looked back.

And so the people who stayed were the people who were either very happy with the Soviet socialist system, or the people who were very old and couldn’t move, or the people who were happy not being very ambitious. Well, you fast forward that 40 years and East Germany is basically a bit of a basket case, with the exception of the area around the capital Berlin itself.

You also have the issue where they decided to make one East German mark work with one West German mark, which again, politically important, but that encouraged people in the East to stay put because they could just spend their money, and didn’t have to worry about actually working hard to learn how the West does things. Anyway, you play this forward 40 years, you get a lot of political dissatisfaction, a lot of economic dysfunction.

It’s not that the West Germans didn’t try. They spent over €1 trillion in order to integrate these two parts into one. It just hasn’t worked very well. And now that the German population is literally dying out because of demographic decline, it’s too late. It’s not going to get better. So while I’m not concerned about what this means for German politics at the moment, you fast forward 5 to 15 years, and I get very concerned very, very quickly.

The second issue argues both for stability and future instability. There’s been a lot of talk in Germany, even before these elections, about the failure of the current government of Olaf Schultz. Now, Olaf Schultz is a socialist. Socialist in Germany doesn’t mean the same thing it means in the United States. This isn’t Bernie Sanders. This is someone who can do math.

And he is in a coalition government with the Greens and a group called the Free Democrats, which are kind of a libertarian pro-business group, especially small and medium-sized businesses. And the three factions don’t have a huge amount in common, and having all three of them in one government has made decision-making very, very difficult at the German level and the European level, because whenever something happens at the European level, the Germans have to go home and hammer out a common position.

And the three parties don’t have a lot in common anyway. Two things here. Number one, this government isn’t going away until its full term is up. You can’t have a vote of no confidence in the German system like you can in, say, France or the United Kingdom. In those countries, if the government loses favor, all it takes is a simple majority of the Parliament to basically vote to call new elections.

For that to work in Germany to eject the government, it has to come from the government, which they don’t want to do because they would get trounced in general elections today. Or, other parties have to come together and form a replacement government with the seats as they exist in the Parliament today. So no, no, no, no vote. You just work with what you have to form a new coalition.

And the only way that would work is if the opponents of the socialists, the Christian Democrats, were to form their own coalition with the Greens and the Free Democrats. And that’s not in the cards at the moment either. So we’re stuck with this government for at least another year until we have general elections. What that means is the central government is basically slouching towards Armageddon.

All of the issues that have vexed Germans—economic dislocations, the failure of the postwar model, the Ukraine war, the rise of the far right, immigration—all of these cultural and economic issues that really are big and do need to be discussed won’t be, because the current government is locked into place and can’t fall. So this election cycle, no big deal.

The next one, that’s when things get lively.

Telegram and the Limits of Freedom of Speech on Social Media (Part II)

Today we’re looking at the importance of Telegram. No, we’re not talking about the thing a telegraph sends. We’re talking about the messaging platform created by Pavel Durov that’s causing quite the stir as of late.

Telegram has become the platform of choice for many of the world’s most unsavory characters – think the Russian military and ISIS. Telegram and its founder opted to not cooperate with Western governments and resisted any form of data sharing with authorities. This was the case, until founder Pavel Durov was recently arrested and promptly released in France.

Now, if I was someone who knew I was wanted in a number of countries, I would probably avoid visiting said countries. I would imagine Durov would do the same. So, I suspect that this was all part of some elaborate deal that Durov and the French authorities cut. If that’s the case, there could be some major implications.

Remember how I mentioned that Telegram was the choice platform for unsavory characters. Well, if Western governments can get their hands on these messages, logs and information, that would be a huge intelligence breakthrough that the Russians would love to avoid…

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

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. It’s tomorrow. I promised that we would talk about telegram and social media regulation in the European space. Well, okay. First, what is telegram? Telegram is basically the Russian equivalent of something like Twitter or Facebook manager. The idea is that you can have a part of your account that is, encrypted due to agree to send messages back and forth that no one else can follow.

Now, when you have a system like this and you get extremist groups that start posting messages, whether that is a right wing group in the United States or, say, ISIS in the Middle East, governments often lean on institutions like Facebook, like WeChat, and the rest to basically give it up. It’s like, you know, this is an issue of public safety.

You need to cooperate and share your information with us so we can do normal law enforcement things and prevent terror attacks. Now, all of the platforms in the world cooperate with U.S. authorities on that topic except telegram. Telegram does not participate in any assistance with any Western government whatsoever. And so you can imagine the quality of people who tend to use telegram.

They’re not the sort of people you’re going to invite to a bar mitzvah. They do, of course, cooperate with Russians, Russian governments in order to keep domestic political opposition in Russia under control. But it was a Russian founded institutions. No big surprise there. Now, the guy who founded this thing, Pavel Durov, left Russia a few years ago because the Russian government was, again, a little bit too hot and heavy with leaning on him personally.

So he’s operated the place primarily from Dubai, but he also had citizenship in France. Well, the French have been after Dubai for quite some time because remember the type of people who use telegram often are not very savory. So you get a lot of drug runners who use this to send money back and forth. You get a lot of child molesters who use it for child porn.

So the French have had an open warrant for Pavel Durov for quite some time. And he showed up in France. He’s flew on his personal jet, surrendered to authorities, was arrested on the spot. Now, if you are wanted by someone for trafficking in kiddy porn, you are usually aware that the government is after you. And if you’re someone as wealthy as Durov is billionaire, you’re not going to just accidentally land your plane somewhere where you think you’re going to get arrested.

So he clearly knew what he was doing going in, and he was released in less than 24 hours on bail. Can’t leave the country. But that suggests to me that a deal was cut between the French and Durov, probably even before he left. And now they’re just working out the fine print of the degree of cooperation.

Now, a few things to keep in mind about telegram from a technological point of view, it’s nothing special. Facebook and WeChat have significantly better encryption than anything that they have. And so, for example, while telegram has not cooperated with Western institutions, most notably the NSA here in the United States had a field day cracking their encryption to go after ISIS.

And that’s one of the reasons why, over the last several years, ISIS has done so badly that they thought their encryption, was fool proof. And really, most of their mail is being read. And so if you’re a subversive element anywhere in the United States, Dell mass just keep in mind that the FBI’s probably reading absolutely everything that you put out there.

Now, back to the telegram. So the question now is, what is the deal? TBD, to be perfectly honest. And I’ve kind of put off doing this video because I, we really wanted to have an answer to that question. But I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is not so much drug runners or child molesters, but it’s the Russian military.

Because while telegram is hardly a very good platform for security, its lack of difficulty in use has meant that it has become the preferred method of communication for the Russian military within itself. You see, Russian private encryption may not be nearly as well as Western private encryption, but it’s loads better and much more user friendly than Russian government military encryption.

So the Russians have had a problem in the Ukraine war that when they are doing some spotting for artillery, whoever’s doing the spotting basically has to go into this ancient archaic system to send time into task targets and coordinates and everything. And by the time that information is encrypted, uploaded, del loaded, delivered and then d encrypted, it’s irrelevant.

And so they’ve just been using telegram to basically text directly to the artillery teams. Well, all that data is on telegram. All of the data for their ship to shore communications, even some air power issues are oh, oh my God, it’s so stupid. Anyway, so if giraffe is really deciding to cut a deal with the French intelligence ministries, well, this isn’t potentially just a breakthrough for enforcement in terms of law enforcement.

This is potentially an intelligence breakthrough for strategic issues because the Russian military has been using it for almost everything. So we have been seeing Russian military bloggers in a not so small number of Russian government personnel in the foreign and defense ministries, basically losing their crap over the last couple of weeks as they’re trying to figure out what it is the Durov is going to give up publicly.

Nothing has been said publicly. Telegram is saying this is a free speech issue. We have the right to kitty porn. You can imagine how that well, it’s going over in France. Anyway, we will know before long just how this is going to go because like I said, Taraf is already in France and France. France isn’t like the United States when the French government and especially French Intel personnel want something, they have two ways to do things where they have very little pushback from the civilian authorities.

Number one, little things like torture in France, if you’re a foreign national, they’re a little bit less chatty about the details. Second, if you’ve ever been to the south of France, it’s beautiful. And there’s lots of villas there that could use an extra Russian billionaire. So whether it Durov is induced to cooperate or is chosen to cooperate, there is a tough road and there is an easy road in front of him.

And the fact that he went to France willingly suggests that it’s going to be the easy road, and someone is going to be having a great time around me in the not too distant future. And the Russian military is going to lose its primary method of communication, and it’s going to lose all of its archives to French intelligence.

And the French are very good at using stuff like that.

Should Freedom of Speech Extend to Social Media? (Part I)

Should people be able to say whatever they hell they want on social media? Brazil doesn’t think so, at least when it comes to public misinformation. While most social media platforms have bent the knee, Musk and Twitter (now X) have held out.

Unlike the US, the Brazilian govenrment enforces laws over public misinformation, which ultimatley led the courts to shut down Twitter within the country. Most social media platforms have complied with these laws, addressing any calls for violence and falsehoods within their feeds.

This is just one example of the differing global approaches in regulating freedom of speech online. Much of Europe is keeping a close eye on Brazil right now to see how this all shakes out, since they have their own issues stacking up…including that pesky app Telegram that the Russians love so much.

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Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we’re going to talk about social media, truth, government, Elon Musk, the right to lie, and all that good stuff. The issue of the moment is happening in Brazil, where Elon Musk and Twitter (or X, if you prefer) are in a spat with the legal system, including the government and the Supreme Court in Brazil, over social media postings. The very, very, very short version is that Brazil has laws on the books that prevent you from lying in the public sphere, unlike the United States.

They are trying to enforce those laws against Twitter. Twitter refused, at Musk’s direction, to play ball, so the Brazilian courts shut Twitter down. Elon Musk, being Elon Musk, said, “Well, I’ll just transmit it via Starlink.” So the Brazilian government started the process of shutting Starlink down. Needless to say, once his bluff was called, Musk backed down. The court cases are continuing. Musk has called his friends at the FCC (the Federal Communications Commission here in the United States) to work that angle against the Brazilian government, and that is in play as well. It’s a lot of back and forth, but let’s start with the basics.

This isn’t unique to Twitter. There are numerous social media platforms operating in Brazil. The issues the Brazilian government is concerned with involve calls for the overthrow of the government, outright lies, and calls for violence in schools. Every other media institution in Brazil complied with the government’s orders to take this stuff down.

What Elon Musk is really talking about when he mentions extreme rights to free speech is the ability to say whatever you want, whenever you want, regardless of the consequences. Social media is new, and so is its regulation. Every time the United States has gotten new technology for information transfer, we’ve had to build a legal structure to manage and regulate it.

If you go back to the 1800s, every political party in the United States had its own newspaper. If you think MSNBC and Fox are bad now, it’s nothing compared to what we used to put into print, with everyone just making things up about everybody else. Eventually, that got tamped down, and you had to, you know, tell the truth to some degree.

Then we got the telegraph. Suddenly, you didn’t have to wait for the morning edition—people could just type things out and send them across the country. Once again, lies, lies, lies. We got something called “yellow journalism,” which was partly why the United States got involved in the Spanish-American War.

To move from a wild west of information sharing and fabrication to something more civilized, you need some level of agreement among various factions of society. During Reconstruction and the Roaring ’20s, the United States didn’t have that. But with World War II and the dawn of the Cold War in the 1950s, we got a series of Supreme Court cases and Congressional laws that built the structure of libel and fraud laws we know today.

What we’re struggling with now in the United States is that we have those fraud and libel laws that regulate television, newspapers, and magazines, but they don’t regulate social media. Social media comes under the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which says if you’re a technology platform provider, you’re not legally liable for what anyone posts on it.

We don’t have laws regulating what people post, so anyone can say whatever they want, and it can stay up for as long as they want. If someone regulates it, they’re doing it out of goodwill or because the government said, “Hey, this could kill people.”

The quintessential topic of the day is Donald Trump insisting that the 2020 election was stolen from him. After four years, Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee have yet to produce any evidence that the election was stolen. It’s not that evidence has been presented and found faulty; nothing has been produced at all. If you don’t believe me, go to Chris Krebs. He was in charge of maintaining election integrity under the Trump administration, and he said the 2020 elections were the cleanest in American history. Trump fired him.

Saying the election was stolen is still illegal in the United States. Repeating it as news is still legal because we haven’t built the legal structure to regulate it. At this moment in our country’s history, we’re debating a few things, so the consensus needed for new speech regulations probably won’t happen soon. That moment, however, has come and gone in Brazil.

Brazil had a military dictatorship in the latter half of the last century. Once civilian rule was reestablished, they got a new constitution, a new currency, and peaceful transfers of government. They concluded that outright lies in political discourse were bad for their society, so they regulate them.

The danger, of course, when regulating free speech is that someone must act as the arbiter of truth. Someone has to determine, on a case-by-case basis, what is factually correct and what is a flat-out lie. In Brazil’s case, since the recent issues involve calls for sedition, coups, and murder in schools, it hasn’t been hard for Brazilians to get behind this. These aren’t gray areas in the free speech debate, but you still need an arbiter of truth.

The judge involved in this case has been on the job since the “carwash scandal” years ago, where multiple Brazilian governments have tried to clean up public affairs. While it may be too strong to call this a bipartisan or multiparty effort, it does enjoy support across Brazilian society. Musk maligned this judge personally, but the ruling was appealed, the Supreme Court got involved, and it was a unanimous decision. The executive branch of the Brazilian government supports it too.

It’s hard to see the Brazilians backing down on this. Brazil is an important country in South America. What matters here is that many other countries are struggling with this topic for the same reasons. The European Union is paying close attention to what happens in Brazil because they’ve already built a digital directive. This directive gives the European Commission (their executive branch) the legal authority to create an arbiter of truth, manage social media, punish bad actors, and handle content moderation. They haven’t built that arbiter yet, but they’re watching Brazil to see what works.

It’s probably not going to be Musk and Twitter that decide this case. The first case for whatever this new authority will be is likely to involve a different platform—something called Telegram, which originates from Russia. And we’ll talk about that tomorrow.

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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

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