Is India the Next China?

When I get the question – “Is India the next China?” – to the surprise of many, I respond with a resounding NO! And the Indians should be extremely happy about that. When most people look at India, they see a ton of people and cheap labor. But once you dive a little deeper, the stark differences between India and China start to appear.

Thanks to globalization, China became the manufacturing powerhouse it is today; India missed the globalization train. So India will probably be just fine when the rug gets pulled out from under the global system.

China’s economy owes much of its success to hyper-financialization due to the government flooding projects with loans and capital. Great for the appearance of economic growth, but wildly inefficient and unproductive. In India, capital availability is low, so the projects that get funding are actually productive.

And finally, my favorite topic, demographics. China is a mess; just go watch my videos on that. India is just now industrializing, so their demography has shifted into the chimney we often see (having the same amount of people in their 40s, 30s, 20s and so on). However, this has happened much later and is proceeding much slower than their peers.

On top of all that, India is geographically blessed with access to food and energy right around the corner. Don’t get me wrong, India has its own set of issues, but they are all on a magnitude lower than what China’s got going on.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the great golf course wilds of Ojai, California. Today, I wanted to do something that a lot of folks have been asking for a while and talk about India. So this is kind of like half in the demographic series, half on its own.

Lots of folks are always wondering if India is going to be the next China because it’s a big country. It has more people now. It has a faster growth rate. And, you know, it’s a legitimate question, but I have to give it a resounding no. And that is something the Indians should be very happy about. Chinese success to this point has been based on three factors. First of all, the strategic largesse of the United States in creating the globalized system, to allow the import and the export of everything on a global basis without having to first secure territory or sea lanes militarily. This came about as a result of not just the American globalization push after the Second World War, but when Nixon went to see Mao in China and to engineer the Soviet Sino split, which ultimately made China an ally of the United States in the later years of the Cold War. That is what created the manufacturing powerhouse that we know as China today.

Now, the United States have lost interest in that, and the United States sees China as a rival. So the continued existence of the Chinese economic model is dependent upon the ongoing strategic largesse of the United States, which is a very bad plan. And we’re seeing the United States hack out bit after bit after bit. It’s already happened in agriculture and energy, in manufacturing, especially in semiconductors. And the United States has the ability to kill any of this overnight if it should choose to. So the economic future of China is, one, without exports and imports and market access. And I don’t know how they can square that circle.

In the case of India. India never joined the system. India was pro-Soviet during the Cold War, and even when the Soviet system went away, the Indians kind of reflexively remained a degree pro-Russian in the years since. So their system is never internationalized. Now that means they missed out on the big growth push that the Chinese had in the eighties, 19, 20 and 2010s. And that’s why the Indian economy is so much smaller. But it also means that when the rug gets pulled out, India really doesn’t suffer all that much.

The second big piece of China’s success is hyper financialization. The idea that the state confiscates the bank deposits and the savings of the population and just floods would be projects without money, making sure that everybody has a bottomless supply of 0% loans so that everyone can have a job. Now you will get economic growth with this, but it will be wildly inefficient and in many cases flat out nonproductive. The closest comparison we have in the United States is Enron and subprime. We know how that went. Now, imagine doing that for every single economic subsector throughout the entire economic structure, which means when it goes down. And it will go down. You don’t just have a financial and a housing crisis. You have an everything crisis. And the economic sector that has been most exposed, that is most dependent to this capital is agriculture. So you can toss a famine on top of that. This isn’t a problem in India.

Now, the Indians system is capital poor, no navigable waterways of note, very high population per person capital availability in India is among the lowest in the world, lower than most of sub-Saharan Africa. But that means that the Indians actually treat capital like money. It’s an economic good as it should be, as opposed to a political good as it is in China, which can be thrown at whatever you want. So again, you don’t get the growth, but you also don’t get the instability.

The third big factor is demographics. Now, we’ve already talked about China at length in terms of just the hollowing out of the entire system. This simply hasn’t happened in India at all. Now, India has, like everybody else, started to industrialize. And so India has, like everyone else, slowly transition to kind of that chimney demography where they have as many people in their forties as the thirties of their twenties. Those are teens. But the process started a lot later than it did in China, and it’s proceeding a lot slower. And so while India is in the midst of rapid aging, it’s from a very late start, at a relatively slow speed compared to a lot of other countries in their peer group, much less the Chinese, which really are in a category all their own. Which means that India today has plenty of people under age 40 to do consuming and even still have kids. If they can find a way to reverse some of these trends. And that means in 10, 20, 30, 40 years, India is going to have a lot of people aged 40 to 65 who are going to be capital rich and high value add and in a system with one and a half billion people, even if that’s only 10% of the population, and it’s more, that’s still a whole lot going on.

Now, in the worst case scenario, where birthrates continue to shrink and the Indian population continues to age, we are still talking about it still being the world’s largest population for at least another half a century. And they won’t be in a European style crunch for their demographic within 40 years. So even if they do everything wrong, even if everything turns against them, the future of India looks pretty good. And they’ve got one other thing going for them that the Chinese don’t. They’re a lot closer to the things that they need. Australia is a much more friendly nation to the Indians than it is to China, and so there’s always going to be some extra food supply or mineral supply that’s available. And India, the subcontinent is the first stop out of the Persian Gulf.

So India is one of the last countries in the world that you should expect to ever have an energy crisis. Whereas China, is the last country on a very, very long easy to disrupt chain. So all of the normal issues that we think about when we think of India inefficiency, women’s rights issues, what that means for their economic growth, the fact that Pakistan is right there. Now, these are all relevant along with corruption. These are things we should worry about. But they’re an order of magnitude less than the problems that are plaguing China now, and they’re all survivable.

There are solutions that the Indians can come up, and even if they can’t, they can cope with these as they continue to grow. Whereas China, we are very close to the end. Alright. That’s it for me. See you guys next time.

The Ukraine War: Operational Updates

Today we’re diving into some operational updates from the Ukraine War. First and foremost, daytime temps this winter have rarely dropped below freezing; when they do, it has not been for long enough periods for the ground to freeze. So that means local forces will be rolling around in the pig-sty for at least a few more months.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, the only viable way to stop the Russians is to start killing more of them…and if they can’t get their tanks mobile, that won’t be happening any time soon. These muddy conditions enabled the Russians to throw wave after wave of troops at targets (like in the Battle of Bakhmut) until they could win and move on.

This is, and always has been, Russia’s war to lose. Come May (or whenever the ground decides to firm up), we will see large-scale offensives from both sides that start to shift the tides of this war.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the San Diego waterfront. I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to give you a quick update on what’s going on in Ukraine. The most important factor is that the weather continues to be warm. Actually, today, the 7th of February is the first day in a month that it’s actually going to be below freezing in Kyiv during the day. It’s going to be chilly for the next few days, but not enough to freeze the ground. And then back by the time we’re into mid-next week, it will be above freezing again. So it is still muddy. As long as it’s muddy, the Ukrainians cannot maneuver, especially with tanks out in the fields. And that’s a real problem.

Any conflict with the Russians was always going to be heavy on numbers and the Ukrainians simply don’t have the population in order to face down the Russians man for man. So they need to inflict massively out of whack casualty ratios on the folks that are fighting. And I’m not talking 2 – 3 to 1 like we’ve seen so far. Like 8 – 10 to 1 is really kind of the minimum if they are going to walk away from this. The Russians see this war as a battle for their existential survival, their right. They’re not going to stop. And so the only way for Ukraine to emerge victorious is to kill so many Russian soldiers so quickly that the Russian front collapses and the military system within the Russian Federation requires years to recover. We are nowhere close to that. And the only way that the Ukrainians can pull that off is if they can outmaneuver the Russians. And that requires fields that are not mud.

This has allowed the Russians to play to their strengths and just throw body after body after body into a few battles, most notably the battle of Bakhmut, which until now the main effort has been led by the Wagner Group for internal political reasons. But honestly, the internal political reasons don’t matter. As long as the Ukrainians can’t maneuver and as long as the Russians have superior numbers, it’s just an issue of throwing wave after wave of humans at them until the weather changes to a degree where the logistics shifts to a degree that the battles can move elsewhere. That’s unlikely to happen until May. Now, Wagner has been using almost exclusively convicts in their human wave tactics. And as to the number of people that have been lost, the estimates are in the process of being revised by everyone, because everyone is, you know, always changing these sort of things during a war. They’re starting to use more radio intercepts to guess how many Russians have been killed. The problem is, if you go with just visual confirmation, you’re going to wildly undercount because it doesn’t count people who are injured who then were taken away from the front and then die because the Russians’ triage system and medical system is beyond atrocious. And so probably for every person that is visually killed, there’s another half to a person that then wandered away and died. Anyway, we now know that the minimum deaths in the war so far on the Russian side is 120,000, and the estimates for Russian deaths in the battle of Bakhmut specifically are somewhere between ten and 40,000, just for one little strategically insignificant town.

Anyway, for the next couple of months, this is just where we are. It’s probably too late in the season at this point to hope for a really hard freeze. So we’re going to have to wait for things to dry out in May before the Ukrainians might be able to move. By the time we get to May, the Russians will really move a lot more troops into the front. They started the war with somewhere between 100 and 150,000. Today they probably have about 250,000. And with the second mobilization already deep underway, we’re probably going to be around 6 to 700,000 by the time we get to May and June. Now, they will be badly led and they will be badly equipped and will be badly supplied and they will have poor morale and they’ll be badly trained. And you know what you call troops like that, Russian. There is nothing about the conflict to this point that is atypical in Russian history. They rarely win on quality. They almost always went on numbers. And we’re almost to the point where we’re going to see just how well these new infusions of NATO equipment help the Ukrainians on the front line and just how many massive waves and assaults the Russians can sustain at the same time. And this is going to put the battle in a bit of a pickle for the Ukrainians because they’re going to be facing two or three major assaults from the Russians at different points of contact. And if they allow themselves to get bogged down, deflecting each and every one of those, they’re going to lose. They need to free this up into a war of movement and allow their tanks and artillery and the rockets to do an offensive in a place where the Russians either can’t resist or can’t maneuver or to counter them.

So by the time we get to May, we are going to be in a very fluid strategic environment, most likely with the Ukrainians just kind of backing off, putting the minimum forces they can in this or that front just to slow the Russians down. While they try to do lightning strikes and blitzkrieg style assault on some other point in the front in order to try to get behind the Russian formations, cut them off from logistical supply and then just dice them up. It’s a risky strategy, but considering the numbers of people and the volume of equipment that Ukrainians control, that’s really the only game in town at this point.

This is still, always has been Russia’s war to lose. And we’re getting close to the point where we’re going to see a strategic logjam break one way or another. And it’s just about three months away.

Okay. That’s it for me. Until next time.

Putin Announces Withdrawal From START Treaty

Most of us have come to expect that anytime Putin gives a speech, nothing good will come out of it…and his one-year war anniversary address to parliament was riddled with bad news.

Putin announced that Russia has formally withdrawn from the START Treaty, the original major strategic arms reduction treaty that served as the only legal and diplomatic basis for US & Russian relations to exist.

With that gone, we’re edging our way back to the early cold war days and we shouldn’t expect any meaningful conversations to occur until the military position in Ukraine shifts one way or another.

On top of Putin backing out of the START Treaty, he justified his war on Ukraine by saying he was reclaiming ancestral lands, which is basically rule #1 for why you SHOULDN’T go to war. For anyone in the western world who was still on the fence about Russia, they won’t be anymore.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is the 21st of February, Tuesday. You’ll be seeing this on the 22nd. The big news today is that Putin gave his one year war anniversary speech in front of the Russian Duma, which is the Russian parliament. Well, it was pretty obvious he was pretty cheesed off about a whole lot of things. But the two big takeaways.

Number one, Russia has now formally withdrawn from the START treaty. Now, the START treaty dates back to the very, very late days of the Soviet Union, the very early days of the post-Cold War system, based on how you draw the lines. I believe it was ratified in 1990, and it is the original major strategic arms reduction treaty. And it is the core of not just the entire disarmament and nonproliferation regime, in my opinion, but also the core of the entirety of the American – Russian diplomatic relationship. Because if you can’t agree that you can share a planet, then everything else is kind of the details. And, and so there was a start one and a start two and a start three and a start four and various agreements, not just in the nuclear field, but conventional weapons that had to do with the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty that regulated how many tanks each side could have. And all of them drew back to START. And the Russians have now withdrawn from every single one of them, with one exception, which was the intermediate range missile treaty, which the U.S. pulled out of. And so now the entire basis, legally and diplomatically for the entirety of the bilateral relationship is gone.

And we have not seen relations at this level of hostility since at least 1983, when we had a nuclear scare over Berlin. But honestly, we’re really edging back into the early Cold War days of the early 1950s, when Stalin was building up nuclear armaments at breakneck speed in order to try to achieve parity with the United States in the post-World War two environment and the early days of containment. So while Russia is at best a third rate military power, it is not a paper tiger. It is more like a rabid tiger with a really bad case of gangrene. And it can do a lot of damage on its way down.

But now all diplomatic relations are basically in the crapper. And there is no reason to expect the United States and the Russians to have any sort of meaningful discussions on anything until such time as the military position in Ukraine breaks very firmly one way or another. As you guys know, if you’ve been following me, the soonest that might happen is May and June, when we get a huge number of Russian conscripts come in facing off of a substantial amount of weaponry that has come in from the West. The balance of forces is very clearly with the Russians in that, but logistical supply is very clearly with the Ukrainians on that one. So it is in its own way a very, very fair fight. And until we have movement on the ground in a substantial way in Ukraine, we should not expect anything to come out of diplomacy between the United States and the Russians. Nor are the Europeans showing any sign of backing down either.

Over the last few days, we’ve had the Munich Security Conference, which brings together thinkers on defense issues throughout Europe and the wider world. And everything was all about the Ukraine war. And when the Europeans showed more spine and more resolve, especially from people in the European sphere that have a history of being pro-Russian or pacifists or anti-American. I mean, they were – whoo – no zealots like the converts – taking the firmest position where Ursula von der Leyen, the chief of the E.U., said she can’t even imagine a future where the Russians don’t pay for the entirety of the Ukrainian reconstruction. And the EU’s foreign policy chief came out and said that the entire EU needs to put funds, especially joint funds, towards the operation and the expansion of ammunition lines. And this is a guy who basically a few years ago said that NATO was a relic and just that we needed to move on. So everyone in the Western world is kind of on board here. While, the Russians have drawn some very clear lines about what sorts of conversations can even happen. And it doesn’t look like very much.

The second big thing that Putin said is he has no intention of backing down from the war because Russia is fighting very clearly for their, quote, ancestral lands. This is one of those things that pops up in all of the war crimes tribunals and all of the war crimes treaties as something you do not go to war for. Now, I think everyone in the world has already pretty much made up their mind about which side they’re on. I mean, we’ve literally had torture centers registered in the dozens with a few of them allegedly even for children. And so anyone who was going to make a moral stance on this already has. But having the Russian leader basically, quote, what is not allowed under international law as the primary justification for what he’s doing, it does kind of underline things and crystallize things, at least for the Western world. Not nearly as big as what’s going on with the START treaty, though, because, you know, getting nukes out of circulation, this is a good thing.

Alright. Well, hopefully I will have a little bit more cheery things to say in the future, but for now, that’s all I got. Talk to you guys later.

US Policy: Russia Gets Blacklisted 

Senator Lindsey Graham captured the essence of what today’s video is all about – “If you jump on the Putin train now, you’re dumber than dirt.”

Between President Biden’s visit to Ukraine and VP Harris’ comment on Russia’s crimes against humanity, it’s clear that the US has drawn a line in the sand, and Russia is on the other side. This means that Russia (or at least Putin’s government) is on the blacklist of world affairs.

According to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Chinese are considering providing lethal aid to the Russians, so that blacklist might be getting a little bigger. Unfortunately for the Chinese, any disruption to the already crumbling relations between the US and China could prove catastrophic.

The breaking point has been on the horizon for years now, and we all should have seen this coming. The ramifications will be huge, and a complete reordering of the global economic system is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

The Wagner Group: Russia’s Flunkies

There are very few instances when a prisoner would refuse a chance to get out of jail… In Russia, convicts have the opportunity to join the Wagner Group in exchange for a get-out-of-jail card.

If you’re not familiar with the Wagner Group, they’re the militant group that commits war crimes on behalf of the Russian government. Or, if you ask the Russian government, they’re an independent mercenary group that just so happens to support Russian national interests while having zero ties to the government. I’ll let you choose your preferred narrative.

Regardless of who is pulling the strings, the Wagner Group is working against the clock. They’ve depleted their supply of new recruits (ex-military and convicts being the two sources), and if they continue to incur such high casualties, they won’t be around for much longer.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Palm Beach. Today I wanted to take a minute to talk about Wagner. Now, Wagner is the Russian paramilitary group that is controlled by a guy named Prigozhin, and it has served the Russians in any number of ways in doing military things that they would rather not be officially associated with. And that has been the appeal from the Russian government’s point of view that this is not a state company, this is not a branch of the military. This is a dude who honestly was just a caterer who decided that he was going to form a militant group to serve Russian national interests. And in doing so, the Russians have had a lot of pseudo plausible deniability and its involved in a lot of war crime activities in Africa and in the Ukraine war. It’s been heavily involved in the battle of Bakhmut, which is where they’ve been basically throwing people after people after people into the grinder. Minimum of 10,000 deaths there, perhaps as many as 30 or 40,000, just obscene numbers of casualties.

Now, the Russians have used things like Wagner starting in the last Ukraine war in 2014. They said that Wagner, because it is not a Russian government, was actually acting on the interest of the local Russians in eastern Ukraine and therefore they were part of a rebellion against Ukraine as opposed to some sort of imperialistic war. Well, now, several years on, it’s obvious that Wagner is just an arm of the Russian state, but that doesn’t mean that we need to get used to it. And I’m not advocating for any sort of strike against Wagner. Wagner is taking care of this itself. You see, Wagner recruits its forces from two groups. The first are former military officers in Russia. But now that Russia is in an active war, there’s no such thing as a former military officer. Everyone is being re-upped and kept within the system because the Russians are going from having a hundred thousand men in Ukraine to 700,000 in the not too distant future and probably more they’re on. So there is no longer a pool of skilled military recruits for Prigozhin and Wagner to pull from because they’re all going to be in the military.

But the second big source of troops that they’ve had during Ukraine is prisons. You go to prison, say, for a six month stint, you will get out. But then they proceed to use the people like cannon fodder, and very few of them survive the next six months. So number one, Wagner has almost emptied the prisons of the people who might qualify. And two, the people who haven’t left are like, holy crap, six months serving Wagner as cannon fodder. I’ve got. I’ll take my chances in prison. Thank you very much.

So one way or another, this is probably the final campaign. Forget the final war or final campaign that Wagner will be part of. They’re just not going to be able to maintain their numbers. And so any talk of a palace coup with Prigozhin trying to get some official position within the government. Honestly, I think it’s kind of pointless because he’s not going to be able to replicate what he’s done.

Moving forward, the implications for the Ukraine War are limited because, you know, it’s still a war. The Russian military is fully engaged, but elsewhere in the world the implications are significant because the Kremlin has been using Wagner to send forces to do unsavory things and generate influence all around the world, most notably in Africa. And if Wagner cannot maintain its current staffing levels, much less expand in the future, it’s only a matter of time before one country somewhere decides that Wagner is more trouble than it’s worth and either sends it home or starts shooting at it. And when that happens, we’ll have a cascade of effects around the world as basically Wagner gets rolled up because they no longer have any recruitment capacity. They no longer have staff in reserve. They can’t surge anywhere, and they’re not an official arm of the Russian government. So they can be cleared out with minimal diplomatic fallout. So it’s been fun while it’s lasted. But this is Wagner’s last year. Until next time.

NYT Best Seller & MedShare Donations

Today is the day! Join me at 2:00 pm CST for the Webinar – Global Outlook: One Year Into the Ukraine War. You don’t want to miss this one!

The people have spoken, and apparently 17 hours of my voice is exactly what they want…

The audio version of my 4th book – The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization – is back on the NYT Best Seller List.

For the entire month of February, all sales of all of my books in all formats will be donated to MedShare. You can learn more about MedShare and their efforts at the link below.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Good morning, everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And the news that you can use today is that my fourth book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization – is back on the New York Times bestseller list. Specifically, the audio version, which is 17 hours of this.

Anyway, for the month of February, all sales of all books in all formats are going to MedShare, which is a charity that provides medical assistance to communities who lack the ability at the moment to provide it themselves. So, for example, if your neighbor is Russia and it’s throwing missiles into your electrical grid and the power goes out your hospital, MedShare helps with diesel and generators and medical equipment, all that. So buy a book and all the proceeds will be going to Medicare. Or you can just go directly to the link at the end of this email. And that goes directly to the Ukraine fund.

That’s it for me. Thanks for all the support and looking forward to doing more of these over the course of the next couple of months. Take care.

Why the Fed Is Shrinking the Balance Sheet

Photo of the building of the US Federal Reserve

Before we jump into the newsletter, I wanted to remind you that tomorrow is the big day! Join the webinar and learn how the Ukraine War has affected global supply chains, agriculture and much more. Click the link below for more info, and I look forward to seeing you there!

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell wants to shrink the balance sheet to zero over the next few years. And while this may be good for the economy and the US overall, not everyone will like the outcome…especially our vest-wearing friends down on Wall Street.

So how did we get here? Well, the Fed is in the business of preventing economic crises, and one function of that is having the “tools” to do so. The typical “tools” we see are using interest rates and other money operations to manipulate the financial system, but what happens when that’s not enough?

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the US economy has seen all the unorthodox tools in the toolbox. One of those is purchasing bonds on the secondary markets…to the tune of $9 trillion. That’s not an easy pill to swallow for everyone, but it goes down a bit easier when the alternative is a depression.

Now that the economy has seen a few years of growth and unemployment is at an all-time low, the Fed is ready to pack up its unorthodox “toolbox” to be better prepared for a future economic downturn. So what does this all mean?

Lots of money is coming off the table very soon. With the Fed pulling back and the Baby Boomers aging into retirement, we’re about to see almost a third of all available capital leave the system. Hopefully, your financial advisor is really, really good.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Good morning from still chilly Colorado. Peter Zeihan coming to you to talk about what’s going on in the world of finance. For those of you who have not been watching, the US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has indicated he plans to shrink the balance sheet down to zero over the course of the next couple of years. So, you know, real quick, what’s the balance sheet and why does it exist?

The Federal Reserve prefers to use interest rates and money operations in order to manipulate the financial system to regulate the flow of capital, the cost of capital, and in general, what happens in the wider world. But from time to time, that is not enough. You can only push interest rates so low. I mean, once you hit zero, there’s really no further to go. And you can only shove so much money into the banking system to encourage lending. If people aren’t borrowing, people are not borrowing.

So from time to time, certainly at the end of the or in the middle of the financial crisis and into COVID, the Federal Reserve dipped into a series of relatively unorthodox tools that use the balance sheet. And what they did is they would expand the money supply to print currency and then use that money to purchase bonds on the secondary market. And they could be car loans or college loans or credit card debt, mortgages, whatever happened to be. And from 2008 until the peak, which was about about two years ago now, they did $9 trillion that way. So, you know, the U.S. federal budget deficit is about a trillion. So you get an idea of just how stimulatory that was. And there are a lot of people who thought that this was irresponsible and that it was inflationary, and it was another unorthodox. You know, they have a point. But from the Federal Reserve’s point of view, the alternative was to fall into a deep recession or maybe even depression, and didn’t feel they had much of a choice.

What’s going on now is the economy is on sounder footing. We are at record low unemployment levels and growth has been moderate to strong for three years in a row. So the Federal Reserve feels it’s time to kind of get out of that business and get back to normal. And if from the point that they really started this process a year ago to two years being done. 3 year process, you know, that’s like three or four times as fast as they built the thing up. So really quick, actually, when you’re thinking about the size of this $9 trillion, that’s a lot.

Now, what will that mean? It should, under normal circumstances, typically mean slower economic growth, because when you reduce the cost of capital, less stuff gets funded and the stuff that does get funded tends to be more viable. So more industrial plant, more infrastructure, more education, less on things that are like emerging technologies that haven’t made it to the prototype stage yet. Less on technologies that don’t seem to be working out in terms of cost benefit analysis. Overall, from an economic efficiency point of view, this is a really good step because shaking out some of the dead weight that has evolved in this environment we’ve had for the last 15 years of nearly free capital. You know, we’ve seen a lot of crazy shit go down and we’re finally going to see a lot of that get shaken out. Interest rates are getting back to a more normal posture. The Fed is not done raising. He’s got at least another full percentage point to go. I would argue probably closer to three. And we’re finally seeing all this surplus liquidity go out of the system and return us to a more balanced system, which means when we get to the next financial crisis or the next recession, the Fed will have a lot more tools, a lot more wiggle room, and the overall economy will be a lot healthier. These are all good things, but what is good for the system as a whole is not necessarily good for each individual piece.

So think of all the things that we have seen bubble up over the last 15 years because of cheap capital. In part, this is the Green Revolution, the technologies that on a cost benefit basis, once you include things like intermittency and geography, you know, are not really ready for prime time. EVs which are very materials intensive and tap supply chains that are not secure that we want to produce at scale, even though their carbon footprint in a lot of the country is heavier than ICEs internal combustion engines for at least several years. And then you’ve got your more traditional crap, your subprime, your Beanie Babies, your Bitcoin things that probably should have never existed in the first place. All of that is going to be in a much more difficult capital environment, and we should expect that to adjust appropriately. But perhaps where we’re going to see the most pain is in finance.

When the amount of money to be managed shrinks, the number of money managers that you need goes down. And it’s not like the Federal Reserve is the only player here. There are other things going on in the overall economic system that are also pushing us in the direction of less capital. I’d say the single biggest one, maybe even more significant than the Federal Reserve in the long term, is what’s happening with the baby boomers.

As you get older, you get better at your job, you earn more money, and after age 50 to 55, your kids have moved out of your house has been paid down. So from 55 to 65, that’s the most money you will ever have in your life. And then you retire. And when you retire, you take your money out of more prospective investments with higher velocity of capital, things like stocks and bonds. And you put them into T-bills and cash because the next time there’s a market crash, if you haven’t done that, you lose your shirt and you’re no longer working and you can’t buy a new one.

So the baby boomers, for the last 15 years have kind of been in that magical era between 55 and 65, where they’ve been saving money and investing it. And that has happened at the same time that the Federal Reserve has maintained an ultra loose monetary policy. Well, on average, the baby boomers retired last year, which means that their money is rapidly draining away from the system. At the same time that the Federal Reserve is tightening policy. So over the course of the next 2 to 3 years, we’re looking at a global reduction in available capital of at least a third and we will probably see the number of people employed in the financial sector in the United States drop by a similar number.

Good luck, folks. It’s going to be all about quality moving forward. Alright. Until next time.

Next on the Chopping Block: Moldova

Moldova is one of those places that most people couldn’t find on a map, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in strategic significance.

Moldova is one of the access points between the European space and the region Russia seeks to control. Unfortunately for the Moldovans, this comes at the cost of a steady presence by the Russians – both militarily and meddling in government affairs.

As the Ukraine War rages on, Moldova’s importance continues to grow. Should the Ukrainians fall…Moldova will surely be in the crosshairs next.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

This Friday, Feb. 17th, join me for the webinar – Global Outlook: One Year into the Ukraine War.

We’ll dive into the global impacts the war has had on supply chains, agriculture, and much more. After my presentation we’ll have a Q&A portion to answer all those burning questions.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a hotel with absolutely spectacular wallpaper. There’s been a lot of news on the Ukraine war on a front that most people haven’t been following, and that is actually in a different country called Moldova. So the point of this video is to tell you what a Moldova is and why it matters.

It is a small sliver of a country that’s kind of a debris of empire. So when countries rise into empires, they tend to absorb a lot of territories around them as they expand. That generates a lot of people within the imperial borders that, as a rule, are not all that happy to be where they are. And Moldova today was at the boundary for what was once on one side the Austrian Empire. Another side, the Ottoman Empire. And on the third side, the Russian Empire. It’s situated in a chunk of territory between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea, and whoever controls it has been able to determine which way the armies can flow.

Now, as the story goes, the Russians have been using their political influence in the country to engineer the fall of the government, which is something I consider completely realistic, because they’ve done that at least a dozen times since 1992. The Ukrainians warned the Moldovans about a week ago that the coup was imminent and now here we are. So whether or not I believe any of the specifics is kind of irrelevant. The Russians have always treated Moldova’s politics as a bit of a training ground for their intelligence agency before they go into like, you know, real countries like Germany for general manipulation.

So for those of you who have been following me for a while now, you know that I view the Russian view of their own space as insecure because there are these nine major access points. And the Russians feel that unless they can secure all of them militarily and put some troops as a military footprint to dissuade attacks in each and every one of them, that they will never feel secure. And unfortunately for Ukraine, Ukraine’s on the road to two of them. One of those is today’s Moldova. It’s called the Bessarabian Gap in history. And it has been the site of any number of conflicts between European powers and Turkish powers and Russian powers. Now, this was all part of the Soviet Union proper, not the empire of the Union itself until the break up in 1992. And in that year, Russia launched one of its first post-Soviet military missions in order to break up Moldova. So there’s a thin sliver called Transnistria, which is the eastern edge of Moldova that has basically declared independence and with Russian sponsorship, has been able to maintain that independence ever since 1992. And there is a military garrison of Russian troops actually stationed in Transnistria to make sure it doesn’t get doesn’t fall to Moldova in general.

Now, the Russians have always maintained a strong presence in the country and not just in terms of troops. They have worked repeatedly to make sure that the government of Moldova is as nonfunctional as possible because they would much rather have a Russian influenced, weak statelet between them and the European space than anyone with any sort of independent opinions.

What we have seen during the Ukraine war is that the Russians have basically tried to use Moldova as a wedge, either to manipulate the refugees coming out of Ukraine to launch missiles over Moldovan airspace into Ukrainian targets or in general just to cause headaches. And this is not something that is particularly well loved by the authorities in Moldova or the population in general. And from the Russian point of view, this is all non-negotiable, just as they would never accept anything less than a full Ukrainian surrender so they can get on to get to those physical gaps. Moldova is one of those physical gaps. And so if we do get into a situation where Ukraine falls, Moldova is absolutely going to be the next target because it’s not in the EU. It’s not in NATO. It’s a country of only 4 million people. And the Russians have deliberately kept it economically and politically nonfunctional for 13 years.

The only other scenario, of course, that’s worthy of consideration is what happens if the Ukrainians win, in which case you should expect Ukrainian and maybe even NATO’s a military action against those Russian troops in Transnistria to eject them and to formally fold Moldova into the European in the NATO family of countries. You would probably expect to see Moldova be able to qualify for membership on both organizations a lot sooner because the territorial dispute they have is internal as opposed to with the Russians. And this is a country that is an order of magnitude smaller in population and like 1/20 the physical size of Ukraine. In addition, the Moldovans are a derivation of Romanians, both in terms of ethnicity and language. So relations between those two countries could actually push in the direction of integration into a single country. And since Romania is already in the EU and NATO. That would allow NATO’s in the EU to expand with not actually expanding anyway.

So two wildly different forecasts based on what happens with Ukraine. And that’s where we are. Alright. See you guys next time.

How Stable Is the Russian Oil Industry?

The big news from the weekend is that Russia announced a plan to cut 500,000 b/d (barrels per day) of oil production. This accounts for about .5% of global supply and roughly 10% of Russian oil exports.

This alone isn’t a huge deal, but when you stack up all the factors working against the Russian oil industry, some concern over its stability is warranted. Struggling to break even, the potential of wells freezing and bursting due to crude flow disruptions, the Ukraine War…that’s a hefty list and it wouldn’t take much to throw everything into a tailspin.

I’m not sounding the alarm bells quite yet, but it’s a good reminder as to just how fragile this whole system really is.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

This Friday, Feb. 17th, join me for the webinar – Global Outlook: One Year into the Ukraine War.

We’ll dive into the global impacts the war has had on supply chains, agriculture, and much more. After my presentation we’ll have a Q&A portion to answer all those burning questions.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from my home away from home, the Denver Airport. It is the 13th of February. And the news over the weekend is that the Russians have announced a near imminent plan to cut 500,000 barrels a day of oil production, which comes out to about one half of 1% of global production. And roughly 10% of Russian exports.

Now, for those of you who’ve been watching me for a while, you know that I’m really concerned about the stability of Russian production, not just because of the war, but because of their geology. Most oil production comes from the permafrost. And if there’s a situation where the crude can’t flow, whether because people are taking the crude away at their export points or because they shut it themselves, the crude in the wellhead freezes into gel and the water that comes up as a byproduct freezes into ice and it pops the wells from the inside and repairing that damage. The last time around took 30 years and last time most of the oil services firms were part of the process. This time they’re gone. So if we do lose Russian oil production for any reason, it’s not just gone. It’s gone for a very, very, very long time. And that is not priced into the market at all.

Now, the 500,000 is probably, probably, probably not a problem. The Russians have about a million barrels per day from the western fields that are not in the permafrost. And so they can shut those in and bring that back on and shut it in again and bring it back online. In fact, they did this in the early weeks of the war last time when people weren’t taking their crude. Well, now we have a couple more things in play. The European oil ban is in place. The European refined products period is in place. It’s not technically illegal to buy or ship these products, but you have to do it without European insurance or vessels if it’s under a certain price point. And that is reducing demand for Russian product around the world because they’re having a hard time getting the stuff out. Also, the break even price for a lot of Russian crude is between 40 and $60 a barrel. And now that the prices that the Russians can charge are under that threshold, the Russians don’t have an economic incentive to pump the stuff in many cases. So 500,000 has taken away half of the buffer. We’re not to the point where we’re going to see permanent shut ins, but we are not all that far away.

Alright. That’s it for me. Until next time.

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a Chinese Spy Balloon…

Unfortunately for the Chinese, their balloon didn’t make it in time for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade…however, it’s made a much bigger splash than the rest of this year’s balloons.

Now I’m no balloon expert, but it seems to me that a “spy balloon” is a little outdated for 2023; especially when an open-source satellite could have given them the same intel.

The effect of this balloon is two-fold. First, it’s shown the world that the disconnect within the Chinese government has reached an all-time high. Second, diplomatic relations between the US and China have grown colder than ever and will likely be strained even further.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

This Friday, Feb. 17th, join me for the webinar – Global Outlook: One Year into the Ukraine War.

We’ll dive into the global impacts the war has had on supply chains, agriculture, and much more. After my presentation we’ll have a Q&A portion to answer all those burning questions.

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey Everybody. Peter Zeihan coming to you from another exciting hotel room today. Today’s Balloon Day. Now, I realize it’s been quite a while since the balloon was first sighted and brought down. But, you know, part of being a generalist is knowing when to keep your mouth shut because you don’t want to just talk about things you don’t know much about. And balloons have never made my top, you know, thousand list of things I consider myself a semi expert in. So I had to go out and speak to a few people.

Let’s start with what the Chinese were technically trying to do. They were doing overflight of a lot of our military bases, specifically our ICBM launch facilities, because the Chinese are new to having a nuclear deterrent and the idea of having reinforced bunkers and silos. And so everything from the type of fuel – solid versus liquid to the type of reinforcements to the type of launch to capabilities to the staging of the rockets. They’re all relatively new to all of this, certainly to doing it at scale. Remember that as early as the 1970s, the United States had over 30,000 nuclear weapons, about one third of which would have been deployed by missile. Now, with arms control treaties and the post-Cold War environment, we have slimmed that down to just a few hundred. But the United States has a deep bench of experience in building and maintaining these things, and the Chinese simply don’t. Until very recently, their entire deterrent was just about 100 or so missiles. And they’re trying to beef it up. Part of the general effort to get into great power competition, and they have a very long way to go. So any little peek that they can get would be great from their point of view. Obviously, from the American point of view, we have a slightly different view of that.

Now, when it first came out, like, a lot of people didn’t really know what was going on. And so my first thought was like, you know, why would the Chinese, I mean, the balloons are big, they’re slow moving. You can’t maneuver them very well. They’re obvious. And so it’s like, you know, I haven’t thought very much of the leadership of Xi Jinping of late or making mistakes in energy and agriculture and finance and economic development and trade. I mean, manufacturing, you name it. We’re seeing catastrophic failures across the Chinese system in decision making because Xi has basically gotten rid of anyone who might tell him no or might tell him yes…but. He’s surrounded himself with yes men. And so we’re just seeing a general breakdown of the bureaucracy and the decision making apparatus. But even with that in mind, it was like, you know, Xi isn’t just stupid. Why would he throw a surveillance platform that would just gently float across the United States? Want to be obvious. It would be seen that obviously would torpedo relations. I just never occurred to me that they could be that dumb. Well, turns out the rampant stupidity that is taking over decision making and Chinese policy has now reached a bit of a break point.

We now know from the responses to the crisis that the Chinese have lost the ability to coordinate within their own system. So normally if you can do something that’s a little provocative, you’re going to coordinate with your diplomatic personnel and your executives in order that nothing else that you’re working on gets ruined. But the day that the balloon, like, floated into northern Idaho, Blinken was supposed to be on a plane going to China, and he had to cancel.

And then over the course of the next week, the Americans were reaching out to the Chinese, and the Chinese refused to take the call because they didn’t know what to say because they couldn’t get direction. And then once it was shot down over the waters of South Carolina, they refused to pick up the phone because they said, oh, no, you don’t understand.

You’re using military force, take out a civilian aircraft. I mean, the just the abject refusal to deal with the situation is the only you only see that when the bureaucracy is seized up, she has so intimidated and purged the bureaucracy that there’s really only two types of people left, those who will do nothing unless they are explicitly instructed to do something, or those who are true believers, the zealots, and those are the folks who will go out on the runways and sterilize them for COVID, or apparently will try to get a balloon over the United States, not even thinking that it might have a problem for relations, which U.S. Chinese relations are the coldest they

have ever been. And with incidents like this, any effort to warm them is not working. So that’s kind of the diplomatic and the political side. This is this is really bad for China and really exposes just a big, hollow emptiness in their policymaking capacity, which I’m sure no one’s going to take advantage of at all. So let’s talk about what the Chinese might have gotten and what the United States might have lost or gotten, because there’s a clear winner here and it’s not probably who you think it is now, the missile silos that the Chinese are so interested in, you know, news flash, you don’t leave those open to the elements.

And so once it was obvious that a balloon was going over them, they just button up, they get their emissions under control. And all the doors are closed. So there was nothing that the balloons could gather that could not also be gathered by satellite. So they basically floated all over the United States and got nothing better than typical open source information.

The whole time U.S. Hardware was tracking that balloon, tracking its emissions, taking digital renderings of the entirety of the structure and. Oh, yeah, yeah. Just just so we’re clear, this was not a weather balloon. This thing was 300 feet wide. That’s a big ass balloon. That’s like an order of magnitude bigger than weather balloons. And I don’t know if you guys know what an embassy airplane is, though.

Those little Barbie dream jets that sometimes you’re on a connecting flight for, they only take about 70, 80 people. The equipment that was hanging from the bottom of the balloon, the payload was bigger than an embassy air and there were long range antennas and listening devices and computing capacity and solar panels on this thing, along with some propellers.

So, you know, the idea that this was a weather balloon was like only if it was planning on monitoring the weather on Venus because it had that sort of range. So the Chinese position, again, and the diplomatic system seized up because the truth was so obvious. But the Chinese diplomatic corps had no idea that this was going on.

It’s part of that whole disconnect anyway. They got very little, if any, information from this effort. But the whole time the Americans were trapped in what was a fairly sophisticated spy platform, and then we shot it down on it over South Carolina, we started fishing for the parts. Now, I like a lot of people, apparently like President Biden, my first instinct was to shoot it down the second across the border.

But as it was explained to me, if you shoot down something of that size, when it’s ten miles up, the debris field is going to cover a couple of square miles in a line. That’s something like six or seven miles long who nobody wants. £200 of Chinese spyware falling through the roof. You people probably would have died even over like the vast empties of Montana.

So they waited for it to be over water. Also, they did detect it when it was over Alaska. But if they had shot it down over Alaskan waters, some of those waters are three miles deep and they wanted to recover it. So the waters over or off the shelf of South Carolina are 30 to 60 feet deep, something you can just do as a commercial dove.

So pieces that are being recovered and we’re getting a better look at spy equipment out of China and their capabilities and their emissions and how they handle information and what they’re looking for as a result of this incident. Then normally you would have gotten after a one or two year probing effort with using more traditional methods. So it’s kind of like the Chinese flew a canary into our cage and we just quietly locked the door behind it.

And this is turning into the intelligence bonanza of the decade. So that’s what happened after a couple of weeks of me poking into this. It’s a really intriguing story. But the bottom line is just the sheer level of stupidity and dysfunction of the Chinese national security experts, if that’s the right word, really has reached a foreign, mentally new low.

And, you know, Congress is going to be stirred up like a band of hornets. And I have no problem with that because this is going to have consequences for the relationship. There’s no way there’s nothing out of this that the Chinese are walking out of smelling. Good. All right. That’s it for me. I’ll see you guys next time.