Who Needs National Security Guidance Anyways

The pentagon in Washington DC. | Photo by envato elements: https://app.envato.com/photos/982e8cf6-356f-43cd-88b2-6fac5fb7d312

The newly released national security document from the White House is more of a culture-war manifesto than a strategic guide for US foreign policy.

The document makes a series of troubling claims and, despite lacking any coherent guidance, signals two major shifts: an institutional breakdown at home and a strategic pullback from the Eastern Hemisphere.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re gonna talk about the new national security document that was put out by the white House. Now, the whole idea of the document comes out every year, and it’s supposed to be the white House guidance to the rest of the U.S. government. What our goals are and what we’re worried about on an international stage. 

So it’s supposed to be tactical advice for generals and admirals and diplomats and all the rest. That’s not what we got this time. What we got this time was the American culture war in international form. It’s basically a campaign document. And whereas all the national security documents in the past have been designed about around guidance, this is really just a lot of really assertive claims. 

And while in the past it’s all been about the United States, this is one is very much about Donald J. Trump. His name came up almost 30 times in the document. If as far as I am aware, in the decades of the white House has been putting this document together, never once has a sitting president’s name arrived at all. 

Because it’s not about one guy. It’s about the country. That is not the case. And again, this is basically a culture war document taking American domestic political considerations and projecting that onto the international system, something that won’t work very well because in the United States, if you want to run for president of a political faction, you have to rally that faction. 

That’s how Trump became president. So he got the Republican nomination. That’s how he took over the party. Yes, yes, yes. But that doesn’t work on the international stage because there is no vote. This is a document that is basically designed to be red meat for MAGA and provides absolutely nothing for guidance for policymakers. It also does a couple of things that are grossly against American national interests. 

For example, it almost expressly ascribes a specific sphere of influence that no one else should have power. And for both China and Russia, and in conflict with several things that have actually come out of this administration, has actually said that the Chinese should have a right to basically control everything in their neighborhood. Russia barely comes up at all, despite the fact that the Russians have killed more Americans over the last 30 years than any other country, far more than anyone involved in the war on terror. 

Obviously not a lot comes up about Ukraine. No real shock there. But what is perhaps most concerning from an international point of view, if you’re not an American, is the attitude towards Europe. Basically, the Trump administration is now saying it’s an American national interests for the politics of Europe to revert to back to where it was in the 1930s. 

And I’m like, it’s like, just remember what happened in Europe in the 1930s. It was not a pretty place. It says national interests of the United States, involve include the ethnic breakdown of individual European states, which is, I mean, fascist and racist are the two words you would probably want to use. And the Europeans are… 

Let me put it this way. If this really is what the United States wants, then we are basically asking the Europeans to go back to the darkest page of their history and basically kill anyone that doesn’t look like them. And to rearm as part of that process and have an independent foreign and security policy. Every time that that has happened in the past, Europe has gotten really fucking crazy in a very short period of time. 

Most recently, we called it World War Two, and before that, World War one, and then the half dozen major wars we had in the 19th century as well. But let’s put that to the side. Does this mean that this thing doesn’t matter because there’s no real guidance? It’s really just a political stake in the ground, not what I’m saying. 

It matters very much for two big reasons. Number one, this administration, is really bad at building institutions. And to implement the things that are in this document requires a fundamental rethinking of American governance, and especially the American military. For example, one of the things it says it wants to do is use the military to secure the southern border. 

If that is what we want to do, that means no more F-35s, no more Abrams, no more special forces. That means retraining the military to patrol an area that’s 2000 miles from end to end to an indeterminate amount of thickness in order to catch illegal migrants. That is a very different sort of force. And the force we have now is vastly over trained for that. 

And we’d be basically taking people that we’ve invested somewhere like 100 to $400,000 per person based on the job, to basically make them all cops, massive waste of material, massive weights of skill sets, and the time that it would take to build up an institution that was capable of doing that. It’s not something that you measure in months or even years. 

A great example is what the Trump administration is trying to do with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They’re trying to double the number of agents and for their domestic policy concerns. That makes a lot of sense. But what they’re discovering is when you take the rhetoric of the white House and combine it with the reality of the immigration, pool in the United States, you get a very different situation. 

According to the rhetoric, they’re going after the drug dealers and the rapists. According to the data, most of the people that have been arrested have no record whatsoever or very, very minor infringements. And so when you’re recruiting people for that specific task and the people who start to look at the jobs realize that the drapes don’t match the carpet, you get a very different sort of applicant. 

And so, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau has had to basically dumbed down their training regimen. They’ve gone from a 16 week course to a six week course. They’ve removed Spanish proficiency, and they’ve basically started to actively recruit from, like, white power gangs because they’re having a hard time getting people who have a sense of what law enforcement is about, who really want to uphold the rule of law, to go into downtown Chicago and get people who are trying to, you know, do yard work. 

I actually have a client who told me a couple of weeks ago that She got hit by a little tear gas when she was out for a walk with her dog, because ice was reading a house where a guy was finishing a bathroom because, you know, the Sinaloa cartel of bathroom finishers. That’s the real threat. 

When the rhetoric is done for ideological purposes, eventually it crashes into reality. And that happens here. And it’s making very hard for this administration to build an institution. They’re pretty good at tearing them down. Which brings us to the next piece. Something that can be done out of this document is a whole scale re shifting of American military power from the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western Hemisphere. 

Very, very clear that that is something that this administration wants to do that can be done. You can shut down the bases in the Eastern Hemisphere. You can reposition your military in this hemisphere and carry out different sorts of activities here. Now, according to the document, they want to do that with allies. 

The problem is, is that the three countries in the Western Hemisphere, that the United States has the strongest links with to battle human migration and to battle illegal narcotics, are the three countries that this administration has gone out of their way to antagonize Canada, Mexico and Colombia. Meaningful trade talks with Canadians are at a standstill at the moment. 

The Mexicans are basically dodging every bullet that the Trump administration can fire their way. And now President Trump himself is down on record calling the president of Colombia a drug dealer. So this is stuff we’re going to have to do ourselves if we are serious about it. One of the advantages of the old system, where the United States controlled the global order and led this vast alliance network, is when the rubber hit the road. 

If shooting never actually happened, the US took control of almost the entirety of the alliances, armies and navies and air forces. Massive force multiplier before you even consider things like basing rights. If we’re going to do this in the Western Hemisphere, if we’re going to do this ourselves. You’re talking about a military budget that’s going to have to at least double, and a massive retraining of everything that we have had the military do over the last 60 years. 

That is a lot of wasted investment in order to do things that would be much easier to do hand in glove with some allies. So overall, what do I think about this document? Well, I don’t think you’re going to find a lot of people with any intelligence or security experience, much less economic experience, who think there’s a lot here that is worth salvaging. But this is only year one of a four year term for Trump round two, and there is a lot of time between now and the next presidential election where things like this can actually dig in 

Until this administration can prove that it can build something as opposed to just tear it down, we’re simply looking at a reduction in the ability of the United States to affect the world around it, and that is something that will reverberate throughout the world for decades to come. 

What Would a Conflict in Taiwan Look Like?

Taiwan flag is shown in an open matchbox, which is filled with matches and lies on a large flag | Licensed by Envato Elements

Let’s discuss what China’s potential invasion of Taiwan would look like.

Should China attack, both Biden and Trump have been explicit that the US would intervene economically and militarily. Beijing doesn’t believe that, though. Despite the echo chamber Xi Jinping has created, deep down, he knows that this invasion doesn’t bode well for them.

China lacks the logistical capabilities to move a large enough force effectively and efficiently across the Taiwan Strait, so Taiwan would have time to prepare, and it would become a shooting gallery. If they somehow managed to capture Taiwan, that would only be the beginning of China’s problems. China couldn’t operate the semiconductor fabs, supply chains would begin to collapse, energy and agriculture imports would falter…

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here come to you from Snowmageddon 2025. We’ve gotten about ten inches, so far. We’re expecting another three before the stops. And if you this is my last video, you’ll know what happened. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon page. A lot of people have been doing war games recently of the Chinese attack on Taiwan, simulating a combined naval and cyber attack. 

And what do I think of their prospects for Taiwanese success? And how do I think the United States, and especially Japan would respond? 

Under the Biden administration and now under the Trump administration, the American policy on Taiwan has actually been shockingly clear. It used to be we had something called basically deniability, where the United States deliberately said that it could neither confirm or deny any particular action. 

We called Taiwan a significant entity and a friendly entity, but not a country that has pretty much gone by the wayside. Now, while there’s not a firm bilateral defense treaty between Taiwan and the United States, both Biden and Trump have said very similar things that if there was an attack, the U.S. would intervene militarily and economically. Now, that is not believed in China. 

In China, the belief is at most they’d have to face some mid-level sanctions, kind of like what the Russians are dealing with with the Ukraine war. But let’s review a few basic facts. Number one, if you think the Trump administration is echo chamber, it is nothing compared to what’s going on in the People’s Republic. Chairman XI purged his last real advisors eight years ago. 

And so anyone who’s repeating the party line is doing just that, repeating the party line. And if you want to get in, good. Well, if you want to get in dead with Chairman XI, the best thing to say. So yeah, Taiwan is a real place. We shouldn’t invade that. That’ll end your career and several other things related to your life very, very quickly. 

Second, it’s a bit of a hop across the Taiwan Straits, over 100 miles. And, the seas are often relatively stormy. So if the Chinese were to pull this off, they would have to build a really large amphibious force. And they are working on that. But the time it would take to merge forces into the zone across from the Taiwan Strait and meet them up with their equipment and then sail them to the few points in Taiwan that you can actually land safely. 

That’s a whole other question. It would take weeks, if not months for the Chinese to arrange. And in that time, anyone else in the world could choose to do something. Most notably, the Taiwanese and Taiwan has had a nuclear power reactor for as long as I’ve been alive. 

So if the Taiwanese decided that they needed to build a few crude nuclear weapons to dissuade the Chinese, that is something that is well within their technical skill set. Third, let’s assume that none of this is relevant, and that the Chinese and the Americans do not intervene militarily at all, even though it would be an absolute shooting gallery taking out all of these troop transports, which are most of which are just civilian vessels that would be attempting to cross the Chinese strategy is literally to shove a million people in the boats and just kind of sail that way. 

It’s not a good plan, but let’s assume that it works. Then what, the Chinese can’t operate their own semiconductor fab facilities. There’s no way they can operate the Taiwanese ones, nor would they even get the plants, because those come from Japan or the United States. So the question then would be, what happens on the next day? 

Remember that the Chinese navy lacks reach. It is designed around the goal of capturing Taiwan, and it would probably be a real sight. But it’s not designed to project power, much less control ceilings. They just don’t have the range. They have a lot of ships, but they’re small and their legs are short. So you put a few ships in the Indian Ocean, maybe in the general vicinity of Malacca, and you cut off the energy artery. 

That’s where two thirds of their energy comes from. You do a few targeted strikes on things like pipelines, and all of a sudden you’ve got a country that imports 80% of its energy, having very little, if any. And that assumes the United States doesn’t do a cyberwar back. So, Chairman Ji, a decade ago knew full well that any meaningful attack on Taiwan is not just the beginning of the end of China’s of strategic power. 

It’s the end of China as an entity. It’s the end of the Hun ethnicity because of energy shortages and famine, because this is a country that imports three quarters of the stuff that they need to grow their own food. And so the decision was made to proceed because for nationalist reasons, they can’t do otherwise. But I really don’t see the strategic math of changing very much. 

All that’s changed is that China today is more dependent on international trade than it was 15 years ago, because 15 years ago, they at least had some people who were, you know, age 40 and under. Now they really don’t have many at all. We’re in the final decade, and if the Chinese are going to try something, they’re probably going to do it in the next decade. 

But if they do, they will be accelerating their utter end and removal from history, because they’re just won’t be enough energy and food to keep what’s left of the population alive. Do I worry about Taiwan? Not really. Does that mean I think semiconductors are safe? Absolutely not. The semiconductor supply chain is the most diverse and fragile thing in the world, and we only have lose one country of significance to globalization or depopulation. 

And the whole thing falls apart. I normally point at Germany is the country I’m most worried about, but as long as we’re talking about China and Taiwan, let me point at China, because they do the processing for a lot of the materials that go into everything. This industry really does take every one, and there’s no version of globalization that can take place over the next 15 years, where we don’t lose the ability to make those high end chips at all.

Uh Oh for Space

NASA photo of the ISS

The Russians had an oopsie with the launch pad at their main heavy-lift launch site following the launch of their Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft heading for the ISS. The unintended destruction of this launch pad cripples Russia’s space capabilities.

However, it’s not just Russia that will feel the heat from this. With the ISS slated for retirement within five years, the lack of Russian participation puts the future of the ISS…up in the air (excuse the pun). NASA isn’t ready to step in, and private sector plans for independent stations all require the ISS functional and in place.

With the Russians unable to maintain a modern satellite network, coupled with their international isolation on the ground, what’s stopping them from sabotaging low-Earth orbit? It wouldn’t take much for them to trigger a Kessler Syndrome event. Not a great look for the future of space.

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Transcript

Hello from chilly Colorado. It’s like four degrees here today. Peter Zeihan here, today. Well, last week during Thanksgiving, something blew up in the former Soviet Union. And it wasn’t in Ukraine. And it wasn’t in Russia. It was in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the second largest of the former Soviet republics, kind of nestled under south central Russia. 

What blew up was at the cosmodrome, which is where the Russians centered their space program during the Cold War, because you want your launch spot as close to the equator as possible. So the spin of the Earth helps you launch things. Anyway, the Kazakh Cosmodrome has been where everything has been happening, for the i.s.s., that really matters. 

Most of the heavy lift is there. The U.S. does launch things first with a shuttle and now with, SpaceX’s Dragon capsules. But it’s the Soyuz that come out of Russia that really have the really heavy lift. Anyway, when they did a launch, the launch pad blew up and repairs are going to take a minimum of months, maybe years. 

And this may be the beginning of the end of the ISS. That’s the International Space Station. Now, the ES was put up there as part of an American, Russian, post-Cold War, hey, we’re all friends now program back in the 1990s and has been the core of manned exploration ever since. However, it’s getting old and it was going to be retired within five years. 

But now, without the heavy launch capacity, at least in the short term, probably longer. It’s unclear whether the Russians are going to continue to participate in the program at all. 

It’s not the 1980s anymore. With Ukraine war three years ago, the Russians have become persona non grata in pretty much every aspect of international cooperation, even Eurovision, with the exception of the space program, because from the American point of view, without the Russians involved, it’s a question whether there would be a space program if all the certainly the ES itself is now in jeopardy, which means we have two problems. 

First of all, without heavy lift capacity, it is questionable whether the ES can persist and there isn’t a replacement program in place right now. NASA has no no plans to put up a replacement system. And there’s a lot of science and a lot of work being done at the ES that really can’t be done anywhere else. 

The plan is for private companies to go up and have their own satellite systems. It is unclear if anyone is ready for that, and everyone’s plans revolve around starting attached to the I.s.s. and then when the ISS is commissioned, moving off on their own, that plan may no longer be viable. And if we’re entering a period where there is no manned operations in space and things like satellite repair become really difficult, especially for the bigger ones, that’s problem. 

One problem, too, is the Russians. The Russians of late have had a very. If I can’t have it, no one can have it, approach to really everything. Because the Soviet Union used to be a superpower. Until the Ukraine invasion, Russia was a major power. And now Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the United States and all the Europeans have basically shut the Russians out of everything they can. 

They just don’t matter in international forums to the degree that they used to. And they certainly don’t have the cash to splash around to buy friends like they used to. So where does that leave them? Well, if the ISS fails and they can no longer have heavy space launch, then all of a sudden the Russians don’t have much need for satellites. 

We did a video, a couple weeks back. We’ll share that on this one, where we talked about something called a Kessler syndrome. Basically, there are thousands, soon to be tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, and very few of them are Russian. The Russians can’t maintain what they have. So you got some old Cold War relics up. 

There are a few things that have been launched since then, but for the most part, this is Starlink and to a lesser degree, American telecommunications. it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think of how the Russians could disrupt that, because though they don’t have heavy space lift, anymore, they do still have space left. 

They have their own cosmodrome in Russia proper, can’t get the huge volumes and the weights up, but it can certainly say go up and blow up a few satellites. And if you do that and you cause the, the shotgun effect of high velocity debris, Mach 25 it doesn’t require taking out too many satellites to cut a cascade reaction that basically makes low Earth orbit unusable for several years. 

And the Russians are now in a position we’re considering that doing it on purpose, is probably crossing their radar now, because if they can’t use space in a meaningful way anymore and everyone else has taken their toys and go on home, then the Russians really don’t see the negative of making space unusable. 

Israel Is Defending…Germany?!?

Israeli button on top of a German flag

2025 has been full of surprises. And honestly, given today’s headline, I wouldn’t be surprised if pigs started flying next. We now have Israel defending Germany.

The Germans have acquired and activated the Israeli-made Arrow missile-defense system. Effectively, we have Israel protecting Germany. All of you have seen my bingo card, and this was most definitely not on it.

With the threat of a Russian invasion still looming, and the pesky little exclave of Kaliningrad, the Germans have been forced to rearm and prepare to intercept Russian missiles. So, we’ve got non-NATO tech coming into NATO’s defense architecture, and the least likely of partners are the ones responsible.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, where it’s cold. The news today is that we’ve got a change in defense parameters in Europe. Not because of anything the Americans or the Russians have done. Or not directly anyway. But because of the Germans. Recently the Germans have turned on, what’s called an arrow defense system. 

It’s an anti-missile anti-air system. They spend about 4 billion U.S., 4.2 billion US on it. And it doesn’t come from the United States, and it doesn’t come from Europe, comes from Israel. So we now have this oil situation where the Jews are protecting Germany. A quick backdrop. So the Holocaust was a thing. If you say otherwise, just turn this video off now and never watch my stuff again, because we’re never going to get along. 

And Israel was founded as part of the whole Western guilt for allowing it to happen. As a result, German post-World War Two German Israeli relations have always been tense, but paternal, if that makes sense. Postwar Germany, once the Nazis were gone, has always looked back on that chapter of their history as something that they’re ashamed of and would like to make up for. 

And so even when the Israelis are doing things that most Germans really, really hate, like carrying out some version of a genocide in Gaza, for example, the Germans have always stood by to a degree, out of historical guilt. This is the first time it’s gone back the other direction. Germany in the post-Cold War environment became convinced that history was over and trade was the future, and no one needed a military anymore. 

And they basically demolished their own. And it got down to the point that I would say that an even fight the Netherlands could probably could have invaded Germany five years ago. That’s not the case anymore. The Germans are going through a really big rearmament, and they’re facing down the Russians, which they know are coming. with the Ukraine war, the Germans have finally admitted that history is not over. 

And if you look at a map where Ukraine ends, Poland begins on the Polish plain. And every single war that has been fought between the Russians and the Germans in the past, and there have been a lot have always involved troops going through that corridor. So the Germans have to be a land power, but they also have to worry about missiles. 

the tool that the Russians have used in the post-Cold War environment is when they are annoyed with the Europeans or the United States, they for position their missile batteries, specifically a system called the Iskander. And they don’t just put it in western Russia, they put it in a little enclave called Kaliningrad. And Kaliningrad is this little spot of territory on the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland. 

So it is surrounded by NATO countries because now Finland and Sweden are also in NATO and of course, Germany, Poland and, Denmark as well. So if you take this little exclave and you put missiles in it, all of a sudden you can reach all of Germany with relatively short range missiles. Now the Germans have a multi-layered missile defense system, or at least one that they are attempting to build with some degree of success. 

The issue is a combination of technical barriers. You see, you’ve got your boost phase when the missile launches, you get your mid phase when it might be out of the atmosphere. If it’s a long range one, and then you’ve got your terminal phase and you need different weapons systems to intercept different types of missile systems at different parts of the arc. 

So the most efficient would be to take it out in the boost phase. When it’s launching, it’s going slow. But to do that, you have to be almost on top of the missile, which means you’re already in the country that’s launching the missiles. There’s a reason why that doesn’t work. In the mid phase, you’re talking things like Star Wars hitting a bullet with a bullet. Especially if you’re talking about ICBMs that are going around the world. no one really has a great mid-face system. All the U.S is working on it. And then you’ve got terminal phase where things are screaming back into the atmosphere. And that’s going to be things like your Patriot systems. 

But what works for one missile system doesn’t necessarily work for another one. So the missile system that the Germans are concerned about, the Iskander only has a range of 515 hundred kilometers. And if it’s coming from Kaliningrad, then what they really need is a mid phase interceptor before it gets into the range of the Patriots. There’s something called the third that the United States uses, but it’s usually for longer range systems. 

But the arrow system out of Israel is perfect because it was designed for things coming from Iran and its record is very, very good. It just hasn’t been tested against modern Russian weapons. So having, for lack of a better phrase, Jewish missiles in Germany to defend against Russian missiles, I mean, my mind kind of spins at using all of those words in the same sentence is really interesting. 

Development. In addition to the oddity of the pairing, in addition to the Germans waking up, both of which are very strategic scenic situations, what I find really interesting here is we now have non NATO weapons in NATO, starting to integrate with NATO defenses to defend NATO against the Russians. So we’re taking an entirely new technical and military tradition. 

That’s the Israelis. And putting it into a NATO system. Arrow is a system that was partially funded by the United States specifically, so the Israelis wouldn’t go on the war path. And for the most part, it has worked to what Washington wanted. But now incorporating that into NATO and, of course, American, defense systems over the long run is going to be really interesting because this is a really robust technical test bed. And the Israelis have a great reputation for taking this system from the drawing board to operationalization in a very short period of time. And now that’s going to be implanted into Germany, where the Germans are. How should we say a little bit more, process minded? So, lots of things that are going to come out of this in the days and months ahead, because the Germans really do need to have something fully up and running, not by 2030, but by the end of next year. 

Because they know in their bones that if the Ukraine war breaks because the Americans backing away, that, Poland is next, and then the Germans are going to be in the thick of the fight, and they have to be ready.

What’s the Deal in Canada?

Canadian flag flying over Parliament

While we Americans were carving up our turkeys last week, the Canadians had a political breakthrough. The Prime Minister and the Alberta Premier made a compromise to advance a new pipeline route for Alberta’s heavy crude.

This pipeline would extend through northern British Columbia, requiring the repeal of federal bans on pipelines and tanker loadings in the region. In return, Alberta will adopt a national carbon-pricing framework. This marks a dramatic shift following Trudeau’s 15 years of hostile relations.

Carney’s restoration of a political middle seems more feasible following this compromise. While there is still plenty of uncertainty about what this next chapter looks like, I’m cautiously optimistic.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a chilly Colorado. It’s only about ten degrees right now, which is like -12 Celsius y Celsius. Well, we’re going to talk about Canada today, specifically on America’s Thanksgiving Day. We had a breakthrough political agreement between the prime minister of Canada, a guy by the name Carney, and the premier, which is kind of like a governor of Alberta, Miss Smith, very, very short version. 

It was a civil conversation that ended in a compromise that will probably benefit almost all parties. It’s like wild, exclusively dealt with energy. Basically, the Canadian government at the federal level has agreed to now push a Bitterman pipeline. That’s that heavy, thick crude that Alberta produces by basically electrifying the ground crazy technology. Anyway, it comes up thick. 

It comes up dirty, requires a lot of specialized processing and handling. And so Alberta has always sold its crude into the American market, because the United States is the only that really process it at scale. But it’s always sold it into a big discount, because it’s a captive market and the United States is an oil exporter itself. 

Now, the federal government has committed to a pipeline across British Columbia, to the northern part of the province. Right now, there’s a federal ban on oil pipelines and tanker loadings, in northern BC. So that will have to change in exchange, Alberta has agreed to a carbon pricing regime with the goal of getting Canada as a whole down to zero emissions by 2050. 

Now we can discuss the pros and cons of that at a later time. But the bottom line is that Alberta has always vociferously avoided any sort of carbon pricing or emissions trading because it is an oil economy, whereas, Canada tends to be relatively green. And even though Alberta is a single largest source of income for the federal government, the fact that it’s all based on the back of oil, has never really gone over well in Ottawa or many other other provincial capitals. 

Now, there are many, many, many, many, many details that remain to be worked out. But a couple things to keep in mind. Number one, we have had the federal government and the Alberta and provincial government screaming at one another. For the best part of the past 15 years. The reason is the no longer in power government of Justin Trudeau was basically had a collective IQ wattage of about four, and couldn’t even pretend to have an adult conversation about any of the topics at hand. 

Does not mean for a second that the Albertans were flexible. But if the federal government really wasn’t willing to entertain discussing real issues with Alberta, of course nothing was going to happen. Now it seems that that is changing. Which brings us to number two. The political middle in Canada has been this vacant parking lot for over a decade. 

The Trudeau government could only rule, even as a minority government, by catering to lots and lots and lots of special interests, of which Greens were one. And that made it very difficult to get anything done at the national level. Even before you consider the Alberta question, Carney, campaigned on returning to the political middle. And if he can lead Canada’s Liberals, which are not a great comparison of the kind of like America’s Democrats, if he can lead Canada’s Liberal Party into the political middle, he’ll dominate a lot of things for a long time. 

But third, like I said, lots of fine print, lots of things that remain to be done at the moment. Canada’s First Nations are not part of this deal. They have facto veto power over many decisions. Number two, British Columbia, which is the province that the pipeline has to go through, is not part of this deal. 

And in the past, they’ve screamed bloody murder to basically scrap anything that Alberta has ever wanted to do. Basically, think of this as the clash between Texas and California just in Canadian politics. And then third, Canada has yet to set up that pricing regime. And until we know what the number is, one of the other components of this deal, which is a carbon capture program, we don’t know how that’s going to work. 

Carbon capture is the idea is that as a side effect of an industrial process, you produce carbon dioxide, and then you inject it into the ground rather than letting it go into the atmosphere. From a cost benefit point of view, it’s a really bad idea. From an environmental point of view, it’s probably a broadly good idea because it gets the carbon work, can’t get in the atmosphere, but it’s not free. 

And until they figure out how much carbon credits cost, no one knows how much you will benefit from this sort of market by putting the stuff in the ground. So lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of details to get into. But the fact that, Carney and Smith were all smiles and had such a broad arrangement of compromises and agreements, we have not seen this in Canadian politics for really the better part of a generation now. 

I’m hopeful, but they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them.

War Crimes, Drugs, Venezuela, Pardons…and Dancing?

Unclassified footage of the first airstrike (1 September)

When the US starts publicly admitting to war crimes, we ought to pay attention. So, let’s look at what’s going on with Venezuela.

Trump has announced imminent strikes on Venezuelan territory. Our most powerful aircraft carrier is already sitting in the region, so things could move very quickly. However, the administration still doesn’t have clear objectives for this operation. If cutting off drug inflows to the US is the main goal, how does pardoning the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of orchestrating major cocaine trafficking routes, fit into that goal?

The inconsistency coming from the White House on drug-war priorities is indicative of the broader chaotic nature of this administration. It looks like the new year is poised to be an…interesting one.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, Peter Peterson here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about what’s going on in Venezuela in the world of Coca Cola. This is going to be a little all over the place because reality is a little all over the place. First of all, war crimes investigations are in play is a short version. 

According to the white House, according to the Defense Department, according to Donald Trump, according to Defense Secretary Hegseth, one of the things the U.S. military has been doing is after it blows up a boat that is allegedly, smuggling cocaine from Venezuela to the United States. If there are any survivors that go in and strike it again, under every treaty the United States has ever signed regarding war crimes, this is a war crime. 

I mean, that’s flat out, going after somebody who can’t shoot back, who’s already been defeated and is basically executing them. This is a lot of what the Russians have been doing in the Ukraine front. This is one of the things that the United States decided back in the 40s should never be allowed to happen again. 

And now we have public admission that this has been happening. The only question is at scale. Now, once it was explained to some people in the administration that this is actually a war crime, there’s been a lot of backtracking, where this will go that’s entirely up to Congress. Which brings us to the second piece, land invasion. 

Trump has now publicly said that strikes on Venezuela on shore are imminent. In fact, they might have happened by the time you see this video. We still have not had the administration present any information on the drug smuggling, on potential actions to Congress. We’re very clearly in violation of the War Powers Act, which was something that Congress put together in the aftermath of Vietnam to make sure things like this could never happen again. 

And Trump is very clearly violating that. But until and unless Congress decides to stand up for itself, there is no functional check on executive power on this topic. We still, according to Republicans in Congress, haven’t had the administration produce any meaningful information on the strikes that have been happening so far on any of the intelligence suggesting that these strikes were against vehicles, were actually smuggling drugs, or really anything about the operation. 

And we already have, America’s most powerful aircraft carrier in the region. As for what the administration’s goals are, they are now deciding what those are. On Monday, we had a national security, meeting in the white House that included, among other people, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs, where Trump started to discuss, started to discuss what the end goal might actually be. 

It looks like the United States has concentrated force in the region before even coming up with a general approach, much less a goal. We have had a conversation confirmed by the white House between Donald Trump and the Venezuelan president, who was Nicolas Maduro, where he basically told Maduro to leave. Maduro said no. And so now Trump is left deciding, you know, this. 

Do we go in and take him out? Do we then install a government in the aftermath? Keep in mind that Caracas, the capital, might look like it’s close to the, coast on the map, but it’s actually on the other side of a thin mountain range. And so an occupation there would be at least as difficult as something like we did in Iraq. 

And this is a country that already imports over 80% of its food. So a mass famine event without massive American logistical support would almost be baked in at this point. We don’t know if you’re confused. You’re not the only one. The administration really hasn’t made any decisions or provided any information. It’s just acting, which is in general how you get into big, drawn out, nasty in broad clios. 

If you think I’m defending Maduro. Nope. The guy’s a nut job. So Maduro is a former bus driver who was appointed by Chavez Chavez as kind of the Chavez as kind of the Venezuelan version of Trump. To be exact, his successor. So we have a former bus driver as president. And after his call with Trump, he went on the air and pledged his undying loyalty to the Venezuelan people and then started dancing. 

Because apparently that’s what you do in Venezuela now when you’re a former bus driver. On the drug front, back in the United States, Donald Trump has pardoned a guy by the name of. Let’s see. What is it? One, Orlando Hernandez, who is a former president of, Honduras. Now, Hernandez has been convicted, not not accused, convicted in U.S. court of law of being the single most consequential person in Western hemispheric history for establishing routes for smuggling cocaine and other illicit narcotics into the United States. 

He was sentenced to 45 years in prison and is now he’s out, free. He and his wife are among the most corrupt people in Western hemispheric history, which is saying something. And he used the tools of the state to establish multiple trafficking routes in collaboration with the Mexican cartels. The difference between him and Maduro is that Hernandez has been convicted. 

I mean, there’s really no doubt at all as to his guilt, whereas Maduro is merely accused. And, Hernandez said nice things about Trump, and that got him the, the pardon. So we have this bizarre mix of policy indecision, rudderless leadership and a rhetoric against drugs, but a practicality that’s actually encouraging them. Now, about the only good news I have on this general topic is that Congress passed and Trump has signed into law, something that puts a couple billion dollars into opioid and opiate, recovery for people, 

But the net effect is that one of the most effective things that U.S. law enforcement has done against narcotics in the last 15 years was just undone by a pardon. And instead, were focusing on a country that is. Let’s to be perfectly honest, a marginal player in drug smuggling to the United States, not saying that Venezuela is not part of the problem, but, if you really want to go after drug smuggling, you start with where the stuff is produced. 

That’s Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia. And then you collaborate with the Mexicans to break down the cartels. Venezuela is a sideshow. Hernandez and Honduras, of course, were part of the court system. Okay. If that’s a little all over the place, it’s because the world is all over the place right now. Apologies for that. I will try to get the world into order for the next video.

Ukraine Targets the CPC in Recent Drone Strikes

Image of a drone firing missiles

Over the weekend, Ukraine expanded its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure to include facilities tied to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), as well as the shadow fleet of tankers that Russia uses to bypass Western sanctions. All told, roughly 2.5 million barrels a day of Russian and Kazakh oil exports are now in mortal danger.

The Baltic Sea is the next-best route for the shadow fleet, and if any European powers decide to help Ukraine…that could be shut down quickly as well. That would leave the Pacific (out of Vladivostok) as the only viable route for the shadow fleet.

Sure, the world is currently in an oil oversupply, but if both the Black AND Baltic routes went down, the global system would be pushed to the limit.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey. Coming to you from Colorado. We got snow. Finally. A couple things happened over the last few days and the Thanksgiving holidays. We’re going to start with Ukraine. All energy related. So, the Ukrainians obviously have been using heavier weapons and, bigger drones and rocket drones and naval drones to attack Russian energy assets across the length and width of all of western Russia. 

They’ve now done a couple of things that are not necessarily unprecedented, but added together are going to really challenge what’s going on in global energy markets. The first is the port of Novorossiysk. Now Novosibirsk is a major naval base and has been a major Russian loading facility for crude for some time. And over the weekend, the Ukrainians hit it again with some naval drones. 

But most notably, they hit something called a loading booey, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an offshore Bui that a tanker comes in, docks with, and then loads up with crude. But this time the, Bui doesn’t belong to the Russian government. It belongs to a group called the CPC, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which is a consortium of international companies that operates the Tengiz super field on the northeastern coast of the Caspian Sea. 

Tengiz Chevron was the original company that founded. This dates back to the Soviet periods. It was the first real foreign direct investment by Western companies, in the former Soviet Union. And eventually, Chevron became the functional operator, along with some Kazakh and some Russian companies. Anyway, CPC is responsible for about 75 to 80% of the total exports of Kazakh oil. 

But because the pipeline has to go through Russia, because the Russians were just dicks when all of this was being negotiated, the Russians throw a lot of crude in the pipeline as well, and sometimes even crowd out Kazakh crude. So the Ukrainians see it as a viable target. So, Tengiz, is a big deal. The CPC consortium is a big deal, but overseas is really where it’s at, because that’s not just an export point for Kazakh crude, but a lot of Russian crude as well. 

Now it’s under regular direct attack as specifically CPC, aspects. So you’re talking about, just from CPC, roughly 1.4 million barrels a day is under a degree of threat, and then another million barrels a day of purely Russian crude. So if the Ukrainians can keep this up and it is kind of the next target in the crosshairs, that is a significant reduction in potential flows. 

That’s part one. Part two is the Ukrainians deliberately, again, using naval drones, went after a pair of shadow fleet vessels in the Black Sea that were coming in from Istanbul. They were empty at the time, which is probably the only reason that the Europeans haven’t screamed bloody murder, because if you actually had an oil spill in the Black Sea, all of it has to flow through downtown Istanbul on the way to the Mediterranean. 

It would be a mess. But we now have the Ukrainians actively, deliberately targeting the shadow fleet, which basically means that the between targeting overseas on the front end in the Shadow fleet, on the back end, the entire Black Sea is now a no go zone, for the Shadow fleet tankers and for Russian oil experts in general. 

And we’re going to lose somewhere between 2 and 3 million barrels a day of flow just from that. That is a big deal in of of itself. But it also brings up the next stage of this Russian shadow fleet. Tankers only depart from three locations near, Saint Petersburg, on the Baltic, near and over a sea on the black, andnear Vladivostok, on the, the Pacific coast. 

One of those is now functionally shut off. The next one to go is going to be the Baltic. And the question will be whether the Ukrainians do that themselves. It is further away it would be harder to do, or whether the Europeans assist, because every tanker that flows out of the Saint Petersburg region has to go through EU and NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Poland and Denmark, as well as Norway and Germany. 

So, you know, if there’s any one of those countries that decides to assist the Ukrainians in any meaningful way, whether it’s time on target information, intelligence, information targeting, going after themselves, allowing the Ukrainians to fly through the airspace or dock at their ports, whatever it happens to be, then you’re talking about roughly two thirds to three quarters of Russian oil exports from a pre war point of view being gone. 

And we’re now in a position where we can talk about what that’s going to look like in just a few months. Now the global energy supply is at the moment in oversupply. So losing one to maybe even 3 million barrels a day of Russian crude is not something that’s going to break anybody. Except for Russia, of course. 

But once you start talking about the black and the Baltic being off at the same time, we’re already up against the upper limit there of how much flow you could probably remove from global systems without everybody, like having a CS. You combine that with more and more targeting of the shadow fleet itself so that there just aren’t tankers available. 

And then we get into some really interesting positions. It looks like calendar year 2026 is going to start off with a bang, and I am here for it.

Where Would I Put a US Semiconductor Fab?

Semiconductor being made

If I were tasked with finding a location for a US-based semiconductor fabrication facility, where would I put it?

Well, just putting in a fab facility wouldn’t do much for anyone, as it ignores the enormous global supply chain that follows the fabrication stage. So, a better question would be “where would a full semiconductor ecosystem realistically go in the US?”

Places like the Texas Triangle, some coastal cities (think LA or San Fran), or western mountain cities like Denver might scratch part of the itch…but they either lack the workforce, the land, or the economics to make it work. The Midwest is the only feasible option; it’s scalable, has plenty of land and infrastructure, and has a strong blue-collar workforce that it can draw on from surrounding areas.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon page. Specifically, if I were to dictate where a high end semiconductor fab facility should go in the United States for maximum outcomes, where would I put it? Well, let’s start by clarifying a couple things. Number one, semiconductor fab facilities, obviously an important part of the process, but they are one part of about 100,000 supply chain steps. 

From the point of imagining a semiconductor to actually getting a product, 30,000 moving pieces, over 9000 companies. Now, fabs are obviously importance where a lot of these pieces come together, but it’s not the high value part and it’s not the high employment part. It’s just a middle place where some things are done, important things, but all of the steps are important. 

So let’s talk about process on the front end. You want to design a semiconductor. Most of that work is already done in the United States. And once you figure out how to do it, you then go to the fab company and you basically have a conversation going back and forth where you figure out how X can become a product and you eventually build, an encyclopedia that’s basically instructions on how to turn this vision into reality. 

And then the supply company goes out and sources all of the materials that are necessary and makes sure that from a logistical point of view, they arrive at the right time in the right format, with the right purity. The next part of the process involves the fab. You basically take one of those purified products, silicon dioxide, melt it in a big that you put in a seed crystal, and over several weeks you draw it up and let the crystal form. 

Eventually you get a crystal that weighs more than a car. You then slice it laterally into thin discs. You dope it with chemicals to make sure that the pathways you want are represented in you then run it through the EUV system. Extreme ultraviolet. That’s a giant bus size structure that, can basically etch structures down to the atomic level, and then you bake it and then you treat it again, and then you zap it again, and then you bake it in. 

I make it that order, really. Is it treat, bake, etch or etch? Baked. Anyway, you do that several dozen times and eventually you get a disc that has several hundred semi-finished semiconductor circuits on it. 

That’s where the fab part stops, because then that just goes somewhere else and it is cut into the individual dyes. Those dyes are stacked and tested and packaged. 

Go into intermediate products that most people like, generically called chips. Then they go in to other things like wiring assemblies and motherboards, eventually built into things like system of a chip that goes into your phone, and then only then do they go into your computers and your phones and your cars and everything else. It is a very involved process, and it requires over an order of magnitude more labor and capital after the Fab than it does to actually build and operate the Fab facility. 

And one of the reasons why the United States has largely gotten out of the fab business is we have seen countries, most notably Korea and Taiwan, subsidize the crap out of doing it there. So we’ve taken the step that we’re not economically good at and let somebody else pay us to do it for us. So if you bring a fab back to the United States, not only do you have to overcome those subsidies, you actually haven’t solved your core problem of all the downstream manufacturing and processing. 

That’s not one company that is literally hundreds of companies. The labor force doesn’t just need to be large and well-trained. It also has to be very modular and adaptable, because what is demanded for the chips of today is not the same for the chips of six months from now or a year from now, much less three years from now. 

So everything that all of those downstream companies do has to be re fabricated over and over and over and over and over. And that requires a very different sort of approach to labor. And that’s not something that United States has historically done. Great. So where can you put this sort of footprint. Because it’s not necessarily about land and water and power. 

You do need this for the fact. I’m not saying that’s unimportant, but it’s really the more downstream stuff that requires a specific time of modular, adaptable workforce and large numbers. Most American cities don’t have that. When you look at places like Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York or Atlanta, there just isn’t really much of a footprint to put the fab in the first place. 

And more importantly, even if you could put it there, you don’t have a dense enough labor footprint with the right skill set in these places. Even where I live here in Denver might be able to put a fab very, very easily because there’s a lot of green space, but the entire Front Range has less than 5 million people in it, and that’s probably just not enough of a labor force. 

It’s necessary to do all the downstream testing, packaging, and incorporation into intermediate product TSMC has been setting up outside of Phoenix and Arizona, a place called Chandler, and has basically run into this problem over and over again. The state and the city can offer all kinds of tax benefits. The federal government can say, yes, put it there. 

But the greater Phoenix area has about the same population as the Front Range. And they’re really having problems establishing all of those downstream industries that are necessary to take these fab components and actually put them into anything we might use. So what we’re seeing is a lot of it just shipped back to Taiwan, where that ecosystem already exists. 

There was really only two places in the United States that you might be able to build that sort of ecosystem on anything less than a 20 year time frame. The first one is the Texas triangle, and that’s the zone of Houston, San Antonio, Austin and, Dallas. And there are a few semiconductor fab facilities there. The problem is that there’s probably no longer enough room in the labor force in Texas. 

Texas has been in relative terms, the fastest growing part of the country for the last 35 years, primarily because of the shale revolution and the NAFTA accords, which made Texas the primary interface between the United States and Mexico. But to make that work, the Texans have always needed people. And while yes, it’s a no income tax state and that matters a great deal, ultimately there’s a demographic story here that is starting to turn against them. 

They bring in people from the south, from Mexico, and further deeper into Latin America because of Houston. They bring people from abroad. But Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has turned those net migrations inward into reverse. So we’re now net negative in Texas in terms of population growth when it comes to immigrants. Second, Americans used to flock to Texas for jobs, most notably Californians. 

But California has rebounded since Covid, and that flow is gone. And in addition, we now have had a series of presidents that have failed to deal with issues of rising living costs. And so we’ve seen significant drops in the birth rate across the country. That makes people a little bit less mobile, a little bit less willing to move for economic reasons. 

And more importantly, it just means we’re not generating enough babies sustain long term population growth. So calendar year 2025 is the first year in American history where the population has actually dropped, with the exception, of course, of the Spanish flu. And in the case of Texas, for the first time in 40 years, they’re no longer seeing the inflows of people. 

So their population has for the first time started to stagnate. That tells me that if you take all of the manufacturing that already exists in Texas, there might not be enough room for a fundamentally new sector that works very differently than everything they have in more traditional manufacturing, the only option that remains is probably where this is going to happen. 

And that’s the Midwest. The Midwest has a number of major cities, none of which are anywhere near as big as places like Houston, of course. But you have a lot of flat land. You have good infrastructure, road and rail link in the area together. You have a huge number of small towns that have still the highest birth rates in the country outside of the Mormon country, out in, Utah. 

And because of the legacy industries in this region that reach all the way back to the Steele era in the 1800s, you have a lot more blue collar workers than white collar workers. And most of these jobs in the post fab industry are some flavor of blue collar, mid-career training. 

There’s just kind of normal for these folks. So you could drop a semiconductor fab facility outside any of the major cities and be able to draw on the broader region, which has over 40 million people, fairly easily. This is one of the many reasons why Intel has chosen to put their new facility directly outside of Columbus, Ohio, to tap the broader Midwest worker community. 

You could probably do something very similar outside of Saint Louis or Minneapolis or even Chicago. And in doing so, tap a lot of these secondary cities that we think of somewhat accurately as time having passed by. And that’s true whether it’s green Bay or Milwaukee or De Moine or Indianapolis or any of the others. So if you’re looking for a full transplant, if you’re preparing for a world where the Chinese are gone and this is just a sector, we need to expand by an order of magnitude, the Midwest is probably where it’s at. 

But the obstacles are many. The investments will be huge. So whatever going to do front load it.

Global Depression Is Coming Sooner Than Expected

I know the tariff policies coming from the Trump administration are giving everyone whiplash, but that’s not the cause of the impending global depression…the tariffs are just accelerating the timeline.

Demographics and deglobalization are the two forces driving this collapse. It has been baked into the system since the world urbanized and industrialized nearly a century ago. Now, Trump’s tariffs have brought this crisis forward by destroying what little fabric holds these systems together.

There was a world in which America’s exposure could have been mitigated through strategic partnerships and building out domestic capacity. However, these policies continue to isolate the US, stifle North American industry, and make it harder for the US to weather this storm.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon crowd specifically. Do I think Donald Trump’s tariff policies are going to trigger a global depression? Or is there another potential path out of this? Right question. Wrong time frame. Here’s the issue. There are two big things that are shaping what’s going on in the world right now. 

And Trump is not one of them. The first one is the demographic inversion that has been working towards us for a century at this point. Short version is that when you industrialize and urbanize and move from the farm and into the city, you have fewer kids. As a rule, most countries we’re looking at 6 to 8 children per woman back in the turn of the to the 1900s. 

And now in most of the world, we are well below replacement levels. In some places like China or Germany and Japan. We’ve been looking at levels below replacement levels for a couple of generations now, and we were always going to hit a demographic tipping point between 2025 and 2035. 

This was always the decade that the model was going to break. We were going to run out of consumers. We were going to run out of producers. We were going to run out of people who could provide capital and be left with a lot of old people who can’t work and absorb capital and don’t consume very much. So the economic model was always going to shift. 

That’s the big one. The second one is globalization. We were always going to hit a point where the United States couldn’t sustain the network anymore. And if you remember back to the world before World War two, we didn’t trade goods. We shot at each other, and we fought over access to consumer markets and raw materials, and we fought over maritime trade routes and all the rest. 

When the Americans rejiggered the world of Bretton Woods at the end of World War Two, we told everyone that we would guarantee security for everyone’s commerce. If you allowed us to write your security policies for you. Basically, us got control of the world by indirectly subsidizing everybody, and that included keeping our market open. I have always said that the decade from 2025 to 2035 was the decade where that was all going to break down. 

Number one, the rest of the world has gotten too rich for the US to continue to inadvertently subsidize it anymore. And number two, we’ve now reached a point where there are so many secondary naval powers the United States can’t guarantees freedom of the seas any longer. So this ten year period, starting this year was always going to be when it all broke down. 

We were always going to have a global dislocation. We were always going to have globalization. We were always going to have a Great Depression on a global scale. It was going to happen anyway. What Trump is doing is speeding things up. He’s breaking down the economic case for having industrial plants outside of the United States without simultaneously building up the industrial plant to replace that loss within the United States. 

And this is forward positioning. The global breakdown to the front part of that decade. So am I a big fan of Trump’s policies? Of course not. Do I think they’re causing a global catastrophe? It’s more like it’s accelerating something that was already well past the point of no return. Now there is plenty of room at the presidential level for policies that would ease the transition, especially for the United States. 

And the first step of that would be building out industrial plants to replace what we’re not going to have access to for much longer. But so far in this administration, we haven’t seen this. We’re actually have policies that are penalizing trade within the region of NAFTA, which is actually encouraging places like China to build more industrial plant in order to take advantage of it, because right now you want to build a car in North America. 

The parts go back and forth across the borders among the United States, Canada and Mexico. That means you have to have tariffs on more than one step in the cars production worth of cars produced exclusively in, say, Europe or East Asia. You only have to pay those tariffs once. And so we’ve had a stalling of industrial construction in the United States at a time where we really need to triple down on what we’ve been doing for the last few years. 

So is this all Trump’s fault? Of course not. It’s Trump taking steps to make it happen sooner. Absolutely. And his current presidential policy in the United States, making it worse for the United States. And it needs to be, unfortunately so.

Kessler Syndrome and the Future of Space

An Artist Rendering of a Satellite in Space

Space debris recently struck China’s Tiangong space station. Given the congested nature of the ~350km altitude band, this collision is a warning of what might come to low Earth orbit (LEO).

We’ve got Cold War junk floating around, thousands of Starlink satellites, and plenty of debris zooming around at this altitude. Sure, there are ways to track incoming debris, but it’s imperfect (I mean, you try avoiding something going Mach 25). Kessler Syndrome is the main concern here; just ask Sandra Bullock how she feels about it following her role in Gravity.

Like everything else in the world right now, space is in flux. A hostile Russia, uncooperative China, and prickly US are all adding to the tension.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about space. Now, you may have noticed in the last couple of weeks there’s been a little bit of drama around the Chinese space station. It’s called the Tiangong. Short version. It got hit by a piece of space debris. Now, the Tiangong is in low Earth orbit at about 350km of elevation. 

And it’s a very, very, very busy shell around the world. Back during the Cold War, when we didn’t have particularly powerful rockets, this is where almost all the satellites were. So there’s a lot of old Cold War debris, especially Russian debris that hasn’t been maintained or even really kept track of on the Russian side for a few decades now. 

And it’s just obstacles. In addition, this is where Starlink does most of their operations, and there’s about 6000 Starlink, satellites there, more than everything else put together. Starlink plans to do another 3 or 4000 over the next few years. And other entities, whether they’re European or Chinese, that are talking about building their own satellite network for broadband, are talking about using the same band. 

So it’s a very, very, very busy area. And that’s before you consider the thing young, which was the satellite that the Chinese had, that they shut down their own about ten, ten, 15 years ago now. Yeah, 15 years ago now, without understanding orbital orbital mechanics. And so it generated 15,000 pieces of debris, of which 2000 are still up there, and they regularly intersect this elevation at 350, kilometers. 

Now, why would the Chinese put their station there? Short version is they didn’t have a choice. One of the things that people forget when they compare, American technology and Chinese technology is the Chinese are in almost all sectors, more than one generation behind. And when it comes to things like aerospace or space travel or ships that means all of their vessels are a lot heavier. 

And so the sheer throw weight that they need to get to get into orbit, requires a lot more powerful rockets, which they don’t have. And so they can’t go as high. They just don’t have as much of a massive budget as, say, the International Space Station. And it sponsors do. The Russians intelligently have chosen to not share rocket technology with the Chinese because they know they would be a target of it anyway. 

So the Chinese are a generation, maybe two generations behind, and that leaves them stuck down here. So what happened was this piece of space junk hit them? And it’s a couple things to keep in mind here. Number one, in addition to being very, very busy, there is a lot of tracking up there, but it’s clearly not perfect. 

And just because you see something coming doesn’t mean you can get out of the way of it. So, luckily, nobody was killed. Luckily, they had a replacement, vessel that they could send up. Luckily, they could bring everybody down safely. 

There’s no reason to expect that. That’s going to be the new norm, though. Oh, by the way, the ISS over about 400km. So we’ve got a little bit more wiggle room in the international system there. Okay. Why am I bringing this up? Couple things. Number one, my broadband out here in the mountains sucks. I have a Starlink, corporate account, which is supposed to give me 25 to 30 And PBS. 

Every second, and instead I get closer to ten. So this video I’m recording right now will probably take me over four hours to upload for you. The reason is very simple. Starlink has sold a lot of subscriptions to support the satellites that are up there. And what they’re discovering is that the profit curve is not what they had hoped it would be. 

Because the more people who sign up, the lower the bandwidth is for everybody else, which means the more satellites they need to send up. But to send up the satellites, they need more subscriptions. Whether or not this is a long term model that is viable remains to be seen. But it is certainly not the cure all that a lot of us thought it was going to be a couple of years ago. 

And the only solution is more and more and more and more and more and more, more satellites in that same band. Because if you put the satellites higher, number one, it takes a lot more energy to get them up there. And number two, if something does go wrong with a satellite in a higher altitude, it’s a lot harder to deorbit it. 

And instead of staying up there for 2 to 10 years, it stays up for 15 to 20. And the reason that gets really important for everyone real quick is something called the Kessler syndrome. If you’ve seen the movie gravity with Sandra Bullock, you have some idea what I’m talking about. Basically, a satellite blows up for whatever reason, sends all kinds of debris out, and then that debris hits other things and causes more debris and more and more and more. 

And eventually all of low-Earth orbit becomes nonfunctional for purposes of space exploration or satellites of really any type, because slow moving pieces, in low Earth orbit move it about mock 25, and a paperclip at that speed is more than enough to ruin the day of any satellite and generate a lot more paperclips. So we’re in this interesting catch 22, and that the only way to deepen and improve space technology is to put more stuff up there, which puts us at the risk of ending everything that is up there. 

And now we’ve got the Russians, who are one of the best space powers, suddenly being hostile to everybody else, the Chinese refusing to cooperate in international fora, and the United States to put it mildly, is becoming a little persnickety know about a great many things. it adds up for an incredibly dangerous and, crisis prone, environment and low Earth orbit. 

About the only bright side I can tell you is that if we do get a Kessler and low Earth orbit, everything will probably de-orbit in under a decade, and then we can try again. So perhaps, just like with everything else in the world right now, as the globalization kicks in, we’re going to be taking about ten years off from everything.