Nigeria, After America

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Today’s entry into our ‘Post American’ series is a country with a complex political, economic and security landscape. Its a country forged from colonialism that is comprised of diverse ethnic groups coexisting under a single political entity – Nigeria.

Despite civil unrest, Nigeria has retained a semblance of stability through a rotational presidency among ethnic groups that ensures representation and prevents disintegration. On the economic side, corruption within the oil industry has led to a mismanagement of oil resources and underproduction.

With global energy dynamics shifting and geopolitical instability on the rise, there’s an emerging opportunity for the Nigerians. If Nigeria can overcome the internal struggles, their strategic positioning and military strength could help them become a significant player in the region; this could even evolve into partnerships with Western powers seeking energy stability.

While this might sound like a reversion to colonial times, I assure you the dynamics have greatly changed. The potential for a mutually beneficial relationship could help Nigeria thrive and even reshape global energy dynamics.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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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.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan  coming to you from a very snowy Colorado. Already ten inches in and another six to go. I know what I’m doing tomorrow. Any who. This is the latest in our post-American series. And today we’re going to talk specifically about a country that a number of people have written in, and that is Nigeria. So what makes Nigeria tick?

This is a country that is a creation of the post World War two strategic order and took a few pages from the post Westphalian system of nation states. Well, in essence, what that means is it’s a little bit like the settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in that it’s a polyglot group, lots of different ethnic groups, each of which have a very clear homeland, but they’ve been lumped together into a single political authority.

Now, in a lot of places where some version like this happened because of colonialism, and you can make that argument for Nigeria as well. It has gone very, very badly with lots and lots of civil wars, and Nigeria is no exception. They had the Biafran war shortly after independence and sixties, and it was one of the most disastrous wars that we’ve seen on the African continent.

But in its aftermath, things went an unexpected direction. Instead of the victors trying to wipe out the biafrans. They were included into a transition into democracy. And while it’s not something that we would recognize in the United States as democratic, what they do is they they rotate the presidency among the various ethnic groups and the other regions. And then within each of those regions, there’s actually competition within the ruling party to decide who is going to be the candidate.

So as a rule, what I’m vastly oversimplifying a very messy situation here. As a rule, the presidents looked at the primary level, basically. And while this doesn’t necessarily generate the most creative or competent leadership, it has kept the peace and has kept Nigeria Nigeria in one piece as well, which is more than you can say for a lot of the other post-colonial countries in the Congo.

Here, Angola, both of which have been war wracked or chaotic or both. Now, the con of this strategy is if you are of an ethnic group that doesn’t hold the president at a time, you have to basically be paid to not protest or riot or launch a war. And that’s where the oil comes in. Nigeria is the continent’s largest oil producer, and most folks say that if civil unrest could be tamped down, a degree of competence could be injected into the system.

Well, then they could probably be producing five or 6 million barrels a day without too much of a challenge. And instead, it’s been pretty much less than three for the last 20, 30 years. Basically, whoever sits in the big chair directs where the oil funds go. He takes a cut of it himself. It’s obviously he and the rest is used to buy off the other minorities to limit their willingness to cause chaos, which of course encourages some of the more militant minded of those groups to deliberately cause chaos in order to get a better cash settlement.

And under the globalized order, this has not been a hugely successful system from an economic point of view, because it means that people actually have a vested interest in attacking the oil patrimony in order to get a slice of the oil patrimony. And that means that the oil patrimony has probably been about one third to one quarter as large as it actually should have been under normal circumstances.

But hey, that’s what happens with a political system like this. Now, that’s under the globalized order where no one interferes in other people’s affairs. You get the series of ethnic based militant groups, some with very creative names, and some of which are creative and tenacious and have taken speedboats 50 miles off the coast to take over oil production sites.

And in this sort of environment, the oil companies that bring in the technology that allow all of this to happen have basically lost interest after seeing their people kidnaped or shot up for purposes of budgetary debates. Most Western oil companies have bailed and the last, such as rolled out Shell, are in the process of getting out right now.

As I am recording this video in February of 2024. It’s not a great model, but the world is changing. And if we’re moving away from a world where civilian maritime shipping is sacrosanct and to one where piracy and state piracy and attacks on ships are far more likely, well then you have to reevaluate how Nigeria plugs into its relationship into the global energy system.

Because right now, much to the Saudi’s happiness in Nigeria is very self-limiting, just like Venezuela has been very self-limiting these last 20 years. And you can count on Nigeria never significantly increasing its oil output for any period of time, which makes them a non-factor. As far as the countries who try to actually manage the oil markets see things.

But if you break down global stability, oil’s just not going to be transported as far. And in places that have a little bit of a hotspot going them like say, the Persian Gulf or Saudi Arabia is you should expect significant reductions in output because there’s going to be a lot of militancy and state militancy, not to mention new imperial activity, either tried to take the oil offline or take the oil period.

And in that scenario, I would expect that the stuff that’s coming out of the Persian Gulf is probably going to fall by conservatively half and take most, if not all, of say, Iran’s crude with it. But Nigeria is not in that sort of situation. Nigeria is on the western side of the African continent. While it has plenty of territorial disputes with its neighbors, it’s not like it’s facing an outright war with anyone.

The countries that are to the northwest, the north and the east are either in the Sahara, so don’t have military to speak of, or in the Sahel, where the densest concentration of populations is in Nigeria. So when we had all of those coups in back in 2022 and 2023, there is a real concern slash hope based on your politics, that the Nigerian military might just move into some of these places and knock off the computers because the Nigerian military, something like three times as large as all of the French coup belt in the Sahel combined, they ended up not doing that.

But the point remains is that Nigeria is the undisputed superpower in the region, from the Sahel down to the tropics. There’s no one else that can hold a candle to them. And if there was a conflict, I have no doubt while it would be messy that the Nigerians could give a lot more than they could take. But ultimately, we’re talking about oil here in a place where the Persian Gulf has problems, in a place where Russia is treated like Russia, and a lot of that stuff goes offline.

Secondary oil producers in the Eastern Hemisphere need to get a fresh look, because if you remove a lot of these or weaken a lot of them, all of a sudden Nigeria shows up as the largest or second largest by most math. They don’t have a physical border where they are going to expect a war. Most of the piracy that’s in the region comes from.

So it is is funny. And I can see a new sort of environment where the Brits and the French are actively looking for partnerships in the Gulf of Guinea region where Nigeria is in order to secure crude that they can’t get from places like the North Sea or the Russians any longer. It’s not that the North Sea is going away.

So this is all going to be spoken for. And so if you’re in that growth, you’re going to have to find another source. The United States can help with some of that. But Nigeria is the only thing that’s proximate, really. You’ve got Algeria to the north, but a lot of their fields are very, very, very tapped. And they’ve been in diminishing returns for the last 20 years.

Nigeria is really the only place where you can work in Greenfield or Brownfield. So I expect we’re going to see a significant reversing of this trend of the Western super majors getting out of Nigeria, because there’s not going to be a lot of choice other or maybe tertiary energy producers in the area. You’re Angola’s you’re Gabon’s. You’re Equatorial Guinea’s.

They’re going to get a fresh look to for very similar reasons. But make no mistake, Nigeria is the security decider in this region. And if they don’t want these secondary powers, especially ones that are closer to them to play a significant role in regional oil markets, then it’s going to be really hard to make that happen. And this is not a colonial experience.

Nigeria may be decades behind, say, Britain when it comes to military firepower, but it’s not like Nigeria is UN industrialized. So you’re not going to see the sort of neo colonial relationships that a lot of people fear where the former colonies come in and take over. No, no, no, no. The population in balance is not there. The technological imbalance is not there.

Instead, it’s going to be a degree of partnership and one that, while it can be messy, is probably going to work pretty well because the French and the Brits have the technology in the markets and the Nigerians have the asset and the guns. So it’s a partnership that can actually be quite productive. The question is of the outside powers who will get there first.

And I’m telling you, it’s going to be the French and the Brits, and they’re not necessarily going to agree on where that crude has to go. So the geopolitics of this region is going to start to look a lot like it did a century in a century a half ago, but with a lot more money and with the Nigerians being a player in of them themselves.

All right. That’s it for me.

Sub-Saharan Africa, After America

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Next on the list in our ‘Post-American’ series is Sub-Saharan Africa. This region is filled with geographical challenges, slow growth and development, and several other obstacles, but a handful of countries will be alright.

Many of the countries in this region are a few decades behind the rest of the world, meaning their exposure to globalization is fairly limited. As the US steps back, these countries will experience less catastrophic fallout compared to fully globalized countries.

On the flip side, some countries, such as Senegal, Nigeria, Angola, South Africa, and the Kenya-Uganda corridor, will be taking on a more significant regional presence. These countries will likely benefit from partnerships with countries like France or Britain and investments to tap into their natural resources.

Remember, the diversity within Africa is unparalleled; between climates, development levels, education, and resources, the outcomes of deglobalization will vary from country to country and region to region.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re gonna do the next in our post-American series on what the world looks like as the United States steps back from managing the global system. Today we’re going to focus on Africa, specifically sub-Saharan Africa. So everything that’s south of the desert, this is not one region. It is one of the more heterodox regions on the planet.

First, going from north to south, you’ve got the Sahel, which is an area of near desert that has fickle precipitation, a stepping climate and generally weak governments and low population densities. This is countries like Mali or, say, Sudan. Then you move into a very, very, very, very thin, temperate belt that for from any normal point of view is more like Missouri.

And then you get into the deep reinforce of the heart of Africa, most notably the Congo. And then as you go further south, it starts to turn temperate again before ultimately ending in South Africa, which is probably has the best climate of any country in the region. Throughout this whole zone, there are pockets of deserts, of denser woodlands and jungle and of mountainous uplifts.

The biggest problem that the sub-Saharan Africans have always had is geography, because when you get to the coast, you’ll notice it goes straight up. Most parts of the coast you have a thousand meter rise in a very short amount of time, and that makes it almost impossible to build most sorts of physical infrastructure, especially rail lines. They just can’t get up that steepness.

And then once you get to the top of that and you go in a little bit more, there’s another one and another one. And in most places there’s five kind of broken stacks, layers. So getting physical connections, not just between countries, among countries, but within countries is very difficult. And so developing this area economically has always been difficult.

And that’s before you consider the deserts or the mountains or the jungles, which are three of the biomes out there that are most difficult for humans to kind of get a purchase in. There are exceptions to this, and those exceptions are going to prove to be the story of sub-Saharan Africa moving forward. There are a handful of places where you might have a chunk of relatively flat land with reasonable access to the coast, where in pockets you can build bits of infrastructure to connect the populations.

And the reason I talk about infrastructure is without that infrastructure, you’re living in a society that can really never break free if you can’t have a road and ideally a rail network within your own system, it’s hard to move goods. It’s hard to political authority, so hard to have political unification. But if you can do that, then you can have a zone where everyone kind of sees their economic bread being buttered the same way.

And that is the foundation. That’s the foundation of most modern societies. So let’s review what’s happening to the world then will apply that to the specific situation. We are losing international connectivity, the ability of ships to travel the ocean blue at scale, especially for things like energy, transport and multimodal multistep manufacturing supply chains. That’s going away. And if you are in Africa and you’ve never been able to develop industry of your own because of these reasons, you’re not going to now, most likely.

So you’re looking at a significant drop in the standard of living for most parts of Africa. But the only thing I can say that argues well for them is a number of these countries have not really advanced very far down the agricultural revolution. They don’t use a lot of tractors, they don’t use a lot of imported fertilizer. And so a lot of these places can take a step back from their partial industrialization, and they’re partial modernization and they’re partial urbanization back to the farm fields and therefore not suffer the sort of catastrophic food losses that we’re going to see in places like, say, China or Egypt.

They never advanced as far as far to fall. And even if they are food importers, it’s likely they’re going forward in 80% of their food. So, you know, that’s kind of one in the plus column. It might not look great, but a lot of these societies are going to absolutely fall apart. Second, capital, we have become used to Africa experiencing a bit of a growth story in the last 25 years because global capital markets have been really flush.

That’s because the baby boomers have been approaching retirement, but not yet retired and all the retirement savings is going wherever it can in order to earn a return. And that means going into Africa. But a lot of this money going into Africa was not spent on infrastructure development, but instead on consumption. So you’ve got a Greek style expansion of economic activity that was underlain by nothing but credit.

So that story, that story’s over. There’s no version of that that continues. So we’re looking at societal cracks D urbanization, but not population collapse and sharply lower levels of consumption as wealth levels drop and the access to credit drops. That’s the overall environment for the continent. sub-Saharan Africa, part of the continent. And that’s not great. But now let’s talk about those exceptions, the places where, you know, capital might still be applied because there is a greater bang for the buck.

Why? Why run a rail line up a cliff when you have a flat zone next to it? Now, those spots are limited. You’ve got Senegal, Nigeria, to a lesser degree, Angola, South Africa and the Kenya Uganda corridor. So let’s run through those real quick. Senegal, former French colony, relatively developed by Africans standards. And the French are going to be experience a renaissance both in terms of their own economy and their ability to reach out to their relatively near abroad.

And that means that Senegal is likely to experience a sort of a neo colonial fusion. I don’t mean to suggest it’s going to be conquered, but if you are the French in a post-American world and you’re looking for places to put a flag. Senegal tricks a lot of the boxes. So on the other side of Morocco, which would give you more influence in Morocco, it’s more economically viable.

It’s easier to penetrate in the interior. And these people, for the most part, already speak French. We all are a little bit racist. But the French are a lot more racist to Arabs than they are to Senegalese. They consider black sub-Saharan Africans to be more legitimate aspirants to the French identity than they do, say, Algerian Muslims. And so I expect a bit of a cooperation free trade deal association, neo imperial, if you want to call it, between the two countries.

Nigeria, who might be different. Major is a powerhouse. Oh, one of the fastest growing economies in the world produces based on the day somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5 million barrels a day of crude, a lot of natural gas exports, LNG, and is a country that has a foot in the Sahel and a foot in the tropics. It’s made up of a number of ethnic groups that have not always gotten along.

There has been a civil war there in the past. I don’t think that’s going to repeat any time soon because that infrastructure built out. There’s more integration among these peoples now. And if you are Britain or France or anyone in Europe who is looking for oil. Nigeria is a place that’s just way too powerful to conquer, but also not quite sufficiently competent to run everything on its own.

Think of it this way In the pre-industrial age, when the Brits conquered Nigeria as part of their imperial build out, they brought guns to no fights. Wasn’t a fair fight. Well, the Nigerians all have guns now. And while the Brits may have better guns, good guns versus bad guns are still guns versus guns. And you throw in that the Nigerians have countries.

What’s the population today? It’s a lot. You can’t have an old colonial conquering, especially since a lot of these people live on the coastal south where the oil is. The Brits, the French, the Americans are would just be incapable. And so you’ll get more of a negotiated partnership between the two. That’ll serve a lot more interests on both sides.

And goal is a fine one for Portuguese. Colony had a brutal civil war in the eighties and you could argue that the most bloodthirsty and brutal faction, the Mabunda, are the ones that won. But that means that they control the access to the coast. It’s a big place, but it’s kind of square and it’s only in the northwest section near the capital of Luanda, where you actually have a break in that coastal escarpment.

And that’s the land of the moon too. So the moon too didn’t just win the war. They occupied the most valuable real estate within the country itself. And similar to what’s going on with Nigeria, there’s going to be a partnership with someone an on the outside, someone who probably has a lot fewer ethical concerns when making deals for than most of the countries in Europe.

The problem here is technology. Almost all of Angola’s crude oil is produced in the deep offshore. Some of the more sophisticated wells that humans can produce from here. And no one in Angola knows how to do any of it. It’s all done by foreign partners. The Chinese can’t help, the Russians can’t help. It’s a very short list of countries.

Now, the Americans are probably broadly disinterested because of the security concern, because the distance and because the crude that primarily comes out of these deposits is very similar to the super light crude that comes out of American shale wells at home. So there’s not much of an economic or security case for the United States to get involved. The Brits and the French are solid contenders, as are the Norwegians, who are very socialist, very pro-human rights, and less involves anything with their energy company, in which case they’re money grubbing, backstabbing, human rights, smashing hyper capitalist, which is always fun.

But I think the better partner to look at is probably Brazil’s Petrobras. Now, Brazil in the future is going to have a lot of problems, but Petrobras is one of the world’s most technologically advanced companies, giving companies like Exxon Mobil a run for their money when it comes to deepwater and offshore, they have their own pre-salt system, which means going down through two miles of water than two miles a rock for them.

Angola is a possible partner. Then it really care about the ethical constraints and they both speak Portuguese. So there’s a lot of connectivity there. Okay, let’s see what’s next. South Africa, between a little bit of Highland and being so far from the equator, you’re talking about a primarily temperate climate here and that means even in the worst case scenario, South Africa will continue to be an agricultural superpower.

In a world that doesn’t have enough food. Then they also have the minerals. You’ve got the kimberlite deposits in the Bushveld area, which provide pretty much a little bit, if not a lot of everything that the United States needs material wise for the GreenTech expansion, for technology in general, and for anything involving electricity. No matter how the world evolves in the years to come, the relative stability of South Africa versus all of the other producers is just huge.

And you’re going to see South Africa just making money hand over fist. The problems of the South Africans will always have, however, are internal. One of the deals that was cut between the oppressed blacks and the ruling whites at the end of apartheid is we’re now politically equal. We all have votes. We can all property. But the whites didn’t want to give up the assets that they had built during apartheid.

So the deal was the whites can keep everything that they have at this moment. But the blacks, no matter who they are, no matter what part of the country they’re in, they get free housing forever. So you got roughly two thirds of the population of the country that lives in these things called townships, which are fenced in enclaves that don’t have plumbing.

And if you ever are driving through even some of the rich parts of South Africa, you’ll come across these checkerboard sections of the grid, the city grid, where there’s the walled in by porta potties, because that’s the only way that they could provide sewage. And as a result, you’ve got a 50% unemployment rate in the country. So this is going to break.

This is not sustainable politically, economically, and what it looks like, it’s going to shape the future of the country from now on. But they’ve got the minerals and they’ve got the agricultural production. So even in a severe mismanagement scenario where you may go down the route of Argentina or Zimbabwe, this is still going to be a massive producing zone.

And then finally, you’ve got Kenya, Uganda, para countries that are on a transport corridor where you have a break in those cliffs. These are areas with relatively dense population structures and an educational level that is easily the highest on the African continent. I would say that it is above South Africa, but remember, South Africa is this huge split between the whites and the non-whites.

So Kenyans and Ugandans are not as skilled as the whites, but they’re much more skilled than anyone else in South Africa. And that makes this the only part of Africa that can kind of go through at least a few of the steps of industrialization and getting into manufacturing. Remember here that we’re looking at a breakdown of a lot of the world with the Chinese system probably being at the top of the list.

So all that industrial capacity is either going to be lost or rebuilt somewhere else. And while I think a lot of it’s going to be coming back to North America and the smaller chunk to say Argentina and bits here and there for Europe in Africa can Uganda is the most likely place where they will be forced to build their own stuff.

So if you’re looking for a development play as opposed to a resource play in Kenya, Uganda, or where it’s going to be, just keep in mind, whenever people are talking about Africa, it’s not one thing. They’re over 50 countries. They’re in seven discrete biomes that don’t necessarily exist, an independent area. So you do have all these identities and fractured infrastructure.

It’s different stories, and that means some of them are going to do really badly and some of them are going to do the other thing.

 

Northern Africa, After America

FOR MORE ON THE FUTURE OF NORTHERN AFRICA, SEE DISUNITED NATIONS

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For our next installment in the ‘Post-American’ series, we’re looking at Northern Africa. This region only has a few countries that will turn out alright and a lot that will hurt for some time.

So, who’s topping the leaderboard? Countries like Morocco and Tunisia have a leg up thanks to their -somewhat- functional economies. On the flipside, countries like Algeria, Libya, and Egypt have an uphill battle ahead of them.

This region will be far from stagnant between military interventions, dependency on extra-regional powers, and a looming famine. But we’re only scratching the surface of this continent, so we’ll dive into Sub-Saharan Africa later in the series.

Prefer to read the transcript? 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.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, We’re going to do the most recent installment of our post-American series. We’re going to start talking about Africa, specifically North Africa. Now, so remember, from grade school, Africa is not just one place. Big continent larger than South America or Europe or Australia. Obviously gives North America a run for its size in every way that matters.

But it is split by the Sahara. So the population of North Africa has almost nothing to do with the population of sub-Saharan Africa. You’ve got a relatively thin coastal strip going from Morocco in the northwest into Algeria, and then it just stops. The Libyan part of North Africa is pretty dry. So once you get past Tunisia, there’s a little nub of territory by the Gulf of Sidra.

But the Gulf of Sidra and areas east are completely barren. In most places, the coastal strip where you get a little bit of rain is less than ten miles. And then, of course, eventually you get on the other side of the desert and you get to Egypt, which has a very different hydrological and cultural and economic history. So women work from west and east.

The key thing to remember about all of these areas is they’re utterly incapable of projecting power. Most of these zones have never had trees, so they don’t have a maritime tradition that’s worthy of the name. And industrialization came very late to them after independence, after World War Two, for the most part. And even then, it’s been very uneven because there aren’t a lot of resources to generate income.

And so there’s not an opportunity to generate a lot of education. And since the areas are so dry, the population has never been very substantial. So let’s start from Morocco. It’s probably the most functional of the North African states because it does rain a little bit more there. The Atlas Mountains do generate a little bit more impulse for agriculture and even industry.

And so in terms of most of the measures that most people care about it in Tunisia, which has a somewhat similar setup, have always been the most advanced countries, But it’s not enough to look after their own needs. Like a lot of developing countries in the post-World War Two era, these countries were able to develop certain sorts of income from, say, phosphate mining in the case of Morocco and a little bit of oil in the case of Tunisia.

And they use that to provide services for their population and to most importantly, buy food. So the carrying capacity of these lands is arguably higher than what is capable. And if something happens to irrational trade, famine is kind of be one of the major concerns moving forward. What Tunisia and Morocco do have going for them, though, is a much more sophisticated population with higher educational levels and a better relationship with outside powers.

So everyone in North Africa lacks the capacity to look after their own needs. All of them need to partner with someone. But these are two countries that have pretty good relations with someone. So in the case of Morocco, there’s a free trade agreement with the United States. In the case of Tunisia, they have pretty good relations with most of the Europeans and have been among the more liberal politically countries of the Middle East.

Now, liberal not like Democrat versus Republican, liberal like women can show their faces. People can get an education. The government doesn’t shoot everyone that they disagree with. And so both of these countries are going to be able to maintain kind of a know what’s not semi-independent. That’s not it. But their definition of sovereignty or their own issues. There aren’t a lot of resources to go after and they have a more capable population.

So it argues for negotiations in their future about issues of security and trade as opposed to anything that’s more neo colonial Algeria. Not so much. Algeria’s got oil and it lacks the technical capacity to keep its oil fields operational, much less expand them. Now, the Algerians, if they were given the choice, would only deal with the United States.

That’s because they actually have a colonial master that’s real close and that is the French. Relations between the French and Algerians have never been good. The French tried to hang on to Algeria during the colonialization process of the 20th century, to the point that the United States and the United Kingdom felt it was necessary to write into the NATO’s charter that things like the security guarantees of NATO’s Article five did not apply to Algeria.

And so when the Algerians fought for their independence, it was a brutal, bloody war that lasted years. Now, the French do have the technical expertise. It’s necessary to maintain the Algerian oil fields. But the Algerians have said repeatedly that they would rather not produce oil at all and descend into poverty and famine and let the French back in.

And unless and it’s unlikely the Americans are willing to step in to mediate this or manage Algerian oil, odds are we’re going to have some sort of reprise of the conflict between the Algerians on the French. And that is going to get ugly. There’s no way around that. The future of Algeria will be determined by how willing Algiers and Paris are to have a conversation as opposed to shoot at one another.

And that is very much to be determined. Libya, on a good day, is a failed state. The only way that Libya ever was able to achieve anything is under the rules of globalization and the globalized order where countries were not allowed to invade one another. But Libya is absolutely incapable of looking after itself. It’s arguably one of the more incompetent oil producers out there.

And since you have a very thirsty continent just to the north of it, there will be a military invasion in some form of what is left of the Libyan state with the Italians being the most likely power and maybe the French in second place, although they might cooperate on this. The future for Southwest Europe is one where France is calling most of the shots, including in Rome.

And so I can see sort of a condominium in Libya there. But there is no room whatsoever in the future for an independent Libya period. And that leaves us with Egypt, which is a very, very special case. The Egyptians have been around for a few millennia, arguably the oldest ethnicity in the world. The problem here is that they industrialize to a degree.

And so they were able to produce cash crops like cotton or citrus, that massive Lee earn massively more money on international markets than wheat. And they then used that money to buy wheat. Now, this kept the population relative quiescent because bread is heavily, heavily, heavily subsidized. But it means that the population is probably now double with the carrying capacity of the Nile Valley would be if they switched everything back to wheat today.

So we are looking at a mass famine event of biblical proportions later this century in Egypt’s future. The only question is how bad and how soon. I’ll give you an idea of how it could get really bad really quickly. The number one source of wheat that they import is Ukraine, and that’s gone. The number two source is Russia, and that’s on borrowed time.

There is no capacity for the world to ship enough emergency wheat supplies in to save the tens of millions of people who are going to starve to death. And that assumes nothing worse goes wrong. Remember, every country in this world, Project Power, can barely look after themselves. And there’s a big shakeup coming to the eastern Mediterranean. And it all depends upon what the Turks do.

The Turks have to decide what they want to focus on. And from the Egyptian point of view, they would dream of the Turks focusing to the southwest and on Egypt and Suez and the valley, because if that happens, then the Turks have a vested interest of getting food into Egypt in collaboration to a certain degree with Israel. But for that to happen, the Turks and the Israelis have to get along.

And so the Egyptians best case scenario is that the Turks agree to work with the Israelis, even though they don’t much care for Zionism and then focus a lot of aid money on Egypt to keep it alive. And that is a wish built on a wish, and it might well work out. But if it doesn’t, we’re looking at half the Egyptian population being in food danger.

And that’s before you consider something like climate change. If we get a really mild sea level rise over the next few decades, the entire Nile Delta, where half the population lives, is looking at getting, if not drowned, salt inundated, which will crush the ability of Egypt to grow food for its own people. So no matter which scenario you look at, Egypt’s time is ending.

It’s not that anyone’s going to take them over or erase the ethnicity, but the ability of Egypt to function as a state with its current population, it’s almost laughably unlikely. And the only question is how does that story end? But the only good news I have is that there’s probably not going to be a mass migration event because there’s a book in the Bible about how hard it is to get out of Egypt.

Physical infrastructure linking the valley to the rest of the world is almost nonexistent. And that means Egypt was going to suffer and maybe even die more or less in silence.

African Coups: Will the French Get Involved?

There’s been a surge in coups throughout African countries, and there’s a common thread connecting them – most are former French colonies.

Looking back at the colonial histories of the French and the British, two very different strategies were implemented. The Brits opted for the economic route – targeting regions and areas of strategic significance. The French took a more ego-driven approach and focused on the biggest swaths of territory.

While the Brits primarily wanted a cut of the profits from their colonies, the French wanted to be in charge of everything, so they hollowed out systems and put their people in charge. Fast forward to the present day, the French have packed their bags and left shells of colonies primed for coups and prone to external influence from China and Russia.

As these coups run their course, French involvement could take on a number of different forms. That’s what makes this so interesting….the French are a wildcard, and their involvement comes down to how they see themselves.

Prefer to read the transcript? 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.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. If you’ve been watching places like Africa, you notice that coups are just happening fast and furious. Obviously, I’ve lost track of how many we’re at now, at least five. But almost all of them have been former French colonies. And that is not just a correlation. There’s some something very real there linking them together.

And so I think it’s worth exploring how this is going down and why and why it’s here. And that will allow us to project for the future a little bit. So the French colonial experience was significantly different than that of the British one. The Brits were a mercantile empire, a corporate empire. They saw the empire as a way to make money.

And the French had a very keeping up with the Joneses sort of approach. So the French like the way the maps looked, whereas the Brits like the way their accounting books looked. So the Brits would go out and they would look for connection nodes, productive lands, if they can find them. But mostly with the notes where everything linked together and they put themselves in there into a cut of everything coming through.

They didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. They just tried to profit from the wheels coming through. Whereas the French it was more an issue of national prestige. So the bigger the block of territory on the map, the better. And it was kind of a sorry French people. It’s kind of a kindergarten approach to geography, trying to make your political map look great, whereas the Brits were concerned with the economic map.

So I think the best example I can give you in this region, in West Africa, there’s a country called Senegal, which was a sizable chunk of territory, former French colony. But there’s a little bite right out of the middle of that along the Gambia River called a country, say, the Gambia. And The Gambia is a former British colony.

So the productive capacity mostly is on the land that the French controlled. But all of the ins and outs and the logistics and the trade was controlled by the Brits. And so the Gambia was a much wealthier colony, would generate a lot more income for the locals and for their British overlords were Senegal. Even today is kind of not the best.

And this is reflected throughout the entire region. So the Brits would go after things like the Nile, so they would take them to Egypt or they’d go after the Highland Plains that have good agricultural zones and minerals like, say, South Africa, where, as the French would take the entirety of West Africa regardless of what was there. So a lot of the French territories are in a place called the Sahel, which is where the desert of the Sahara starts to get a little bit of moisture.

And so, you know, you can have some people and then transition into the rainforest. It’s the transition zone that economically is subpar and based on climate shifts, whether from human made climate change or things going back, it moves what areas are dry and wet. So the French were able to take control of it very easily because the local populations were, in many cases nomadic, but they never had dense population patterns.

They never had a lot of cultivation. They never had a lot of mining. They never had a lot of wealth. But the French could control it. And these are the territories that are now going through these political ossification and breaks. And now so no coincidence that it’s the French territories that are not as durable politically and economically as the former British colonies.

The second issue is one of political culture of the empires, since the Brits were primarily concerned with the income that they could get. They did not want to disrupt the initial original political and economic classes. They just installed their colonial overseers as governors general about that and allowed the locals to run. Most businesses themselves. And the Brits just took the cuts.

The French? No, no, no, no, no. It was about French control. So one of the first things that the French did whenever they came into a community is get rid by death or otherwise of anyone who was in charge. And then the French colonials would take over everything directly. They might not understand the local economy then that might not be permitted wormwood which could be a problem.

But more importantly, it meant that when the French colonials finally did leave, they didn’t leave a whole lot behind. I mean, the Indians will tell you no end of stories of how horrible the Brits were to them. It’s a case to be made there, but the Brits never really disrupted the political leadership. And so when the Brits did leave, the Indians were perfectly capable of ruling the country themselves.

In the case of the French, the French might have helped set up a specific group to take over when the French left, but that group, because it was hand-picked, would probably be resented by everyone else who was there. And by the time you fast forward to the 2020s, some of these dudes have been there for 50 or 60 years, or the sons of the original deputies and the locals don’t think very highly of them.

And so they’re getting offed in this sort of situation. The French have gotten pretty good at interpersonal relationships, and they’re very comfortable at backing the big man who’s in charge of everything. But because they never got into that kind of societal management of the British, they’re not very good at fighting the support mechanisms, aside from, say, guns and intelligence that are necessary to allow these big men leaders to actually run their countries in a capable way.

So you have a coup before all institution of government fails and is replaced by something else. It becomes very much a blank slate. Now, in blank slate scenarios, it’s fairly easy for an outside power to come in giving them on the ground floor or something new and try to usurp French power a little bit. Because the French power got wiped away when it got turned into a blank slate.

And this has provided significant opportunities for, say, the Chinese and the Russians to go into an area where they were never the colonial powers, where the historical experience is minimal. It actually makes a real gains. But this is temporary. It’s a blank slate. Nothing is established and the French are still much closer. And the local language is typically French.

And you’re dealing with an environment where the French know how to play this game, because if it’s someone else’s institutions, the French are perfectly capable of coming in and making their own blank slate. Remember, the French are much less squeamish than the Anglos about things like suitcase, size of cash and assassinations. And so what we’re seeing right now is the French are trying to decide their plan of attack.

Do they want to wipe out the people who wiped out their people double blind slate? Or do they just want to see if these people can successfully consolidate, in which case they go with that suitcase of cash? Or are the French or the Chinese going to get there first and set up their own institution, in which case the French have to come in and assassinate someone?

These are all viable options from the French point of view. But perhaps the single most important thing that people miss when they’re looking at the French and their former colonies is because the French ran their empire is basically a giant ego stroking machine as opposed to a moneymaking machine. That means that they don’t actually have significant national interests in most of these countries.

And there is nothing like, say, the British exposure to a like Gibraltar, where it’s actually a strategic interest for India, where there’s an economic interest. The French are capable of just swallowing their ego and walking away. But I think the most important thing to think about here is the French are much more comfortable in this environment and know how to manipulate it.

They’re better at assassinations if they don’t like the way it’s going to go. And because they don’t have any sunk national interest in this stuff, they have no problem walking into someone else’s experiment and just destroying it. So don’t think a French intervention or not intervention in West Africa as the sort of thing you might see out of the Americans or the Brits or even the Russians.

The sunk costs here are low, and that makes the French perhaps the most interesting thing that can happen in an interaction all tussle unpredictable because it all comes down to how the French see themselves and everyone else. Due details.

Nigeria Votes: 2023 Presidential Elections and a New Hope

Nigerians will head to the polls Saturday, February 25 in what could prove to be one of the largest upset victories in Africa’s largest democracy and, historically, its largest oil producer. The elections are coming at a critical time for Nigeria: 2022 saw oil production drop to 32-year lows, national debt levels rise, and a resurgence in jihadist and communal violence.

Nigeria is an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse nation. Africa’s most populous country can roughly be divided into north and south. Northern Nigeria is predominantly Muslim and home to the Hausa-Fulani ethnic groups—Nigeria’s largest ethnic group. SW Nigeria is home to the Yoruba, mixed Muslim and Christian community. SE Nigeria is home to the predominantly Christian Igbo, and then the rest of the Delta, especially the coast, is home to the Ijaw people (and most of the nation’s oil and gas reserves). For much of Nigeria’s post-junta history, there has been an unofficial power-sharing pact between the country’s northern and southern—primarily Yoruba—leaders.

Nigeria’s military junta formally stepped down in 1999. Between 1999 and 2015, the center-left (economically) but socially conservative People’s Democratic Party held the presidency. The PDP is the primary architect between the unofficial rule of having Northern and Southern states alternate in naming a presidential candidate, who would serve two 4-year terms. The first challenge to this power-sharing agreement came in 2010, when former president Umaru Yar’Adua died in office during his first term. Rather than having another northern candidate succeed him, southerner Goodluck Jonathan (Yar’Adua’s VP) ran successfully for office in 2011.

Goodluck Jonathan lost his presidential bid in 2015, the first Nigerian incumbent since 1999 ever to do so. He was defeated by former military dictator and member of the newly formed All Progressives Congress, Muhammadu Buhari. Buhari is barred from seeking a third consecutive term.

Whatever the results of Saturday’s election, this has already proven to be a historic, and disruptive, election season for Nigeria. The frontrunner in most polls for months has been the (relatively) young, charismatic Igbo former governor of southern Anambra State, running as part of the social democratic Labour Party. Obi, who at 61 is the youngest among the four major party candidates, was formerly a member of the long-ruling People’s Democratic Party. He is also the only current front-runner to have been born after Nigeria’s independence from the United Kingdom. This is also the first election in which no major candidate is a former general—a key distinction for a country with a former long-ruling military junta. Obi’s third-party candidacy has been propelled by a surge in enthusiasm among young and disenfranchised voters and a sleek, savvy social media campaign.

There’s still a question of how accurate polling will be, given the generational divide in supporters for the various candidates, as well as Obi and the Labour Party’s lack of the entrenched political patronage systems used by the PDP and incumbent All Progressives Congress. But one thing is certain: Nigeria’s voters, especially its youth, are increasingly frustrated with an established political class that is floundering in the face of a crumbling economy, deteriorating security environment, and lackluster government services. Much of this came to a head in 2022, as historic flooding displaced nearly 1.4 million Nigerians and the economy experienced several cash shortages amidst a botched rollout of monetary reforms.

No matter who wins the first round of elections tomorrow, they face a staggering to-do list. Nigeria is a country whose economy and national security have been held together for decades with a particularly addictive, if not entirely effective, type of bandage: petrodollars. Buoyed by many years of strong oil production and revenues, the PDP used state oil revenues to build large patronage networks and pad the pockets of many a politician—something even government officials are now quick to mention in the face of Obi’s popularity.

But unofficially, leaders have claimed that the endemic corruption that has hounded Nigerian governance and beleaguered its economy is a necessary part of distributing oil revenues to various community groups and leaders to keep a fragile peace. The bulk of Nigeria’s oil resources is in the country’s southern coastal regions, far from the Sahelian landscapes of the Hausa-Fulani or even Lagos and the primarily Yoruba regions of the southwest. If only. With endemic corruption and poor infrastructure development and strong inter-communal competition, unfortunately comes violence and organized crime.

Oil bunkering under the Buhari administration reached such a fever pitch that foreign majors finally more-or-less called it quits in regard to on-shore oil production. A system addicted to using cash to plug gaps and pad pockets cannot pivot easily, and so Nigeria has increasingly turned toward borrowing to finance various government schemes and initiatives. And so, despite being one of the most resource-rich countries in Africa, Nigeria is facing both increasing costs to finance its debt and declining revenues. Nigeria’s rising debt stock is becoming increasingly problematic in the face of dwindling revenue and the unsustainable burden of subsidy payments. A handful of international organizations have condemned the country’s appetite for borrowing, with the IMF saying, “the Nigerian government may spend nearly 100 percent of its revenue on debt servicing by 2026”. Between 1999 and 2021, local and external federal government borrowings jumped from N3.55 trillion to N26.91 trillion, an increase of 658 percent. The Buhari administration has overseen a 290% rise in foreign debt alone).

Similarly, the entrenched Islamist threat in Northern Nigeria shows little sign of stopping, especially given the arc of instability and mutable borders in the countries lining Nigeria’s Sahelian northern border: Niger, Chad and arguably Burkina Faso and Mali. And still, no real plan or capability to manage the organized criminal elements in its southern delta states stymying the very real (and very expensive) investment needs its ailing onshore fields, pipelines and refineries need to maintain, let alone boost, production.

And then there’s perhaps the largest challenge facing a potential President Obi or any of his rivals: at roughly 215 million people, Nigeria is Africa’s largest country—and growing. With a birth rate (5.3 per woman) that has barely ticked down since the 1960s, Nigeria is a very large and very young country, with entrenched ethnic, religious and geographic divisions and an ever-weakening central government.

Whoever wins Saturday’s election faces a critical and difficult to-do list ahead of them.

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

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Join Us – The Ukraine War: Agriculture Edition

Below is one of my favorite (if incredibly depressing) graphics from our most recent book, Disunited Nations.
 
Before Africa began the industrialization process, only the best lands on the continent were under cultivation. As a rule, slopes, jungle, arids, and marshes make for horrible farmland, and Africa was no exception. Africa in 1950 had well less than one-quarter of its land mass under crop, and yields per acre were decidedly pre-industrial.
 
But then the American-led globalized Order occurred. Africans were for the first time able to tap industrial inputs en masse: fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, better seeds and mechanical equipment. And above, finance, to allow for the purchase of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, better seeds and mechanical equipment.

Fast-forward to the year 2000 and Africa became a continent changed. Add industrial inputs to okish lands and the Africans got great yields. Add industrial inputs to crap lands and the Africans got okish yields. In five decades, the Africans presided over the quintupling of their local food supplies. The reason we think of Africa as food insecure is because most African countries … are. Output may have increased by a factor of five, but during the same time window Africa’s population increased by a factor of six.
 
Industrialization is great…until it’s not. Nearly all of Africa’s agricultural inputs are imported from a different continent. Should anything happen to those input flows, much of what has made modern African agriculture successful will unwind with a vengeance…and Africa’s population will still need to be fed.
 
We’ve been babystepping to a collapse of agricultural supply chains for over a decade, but the sharp shock of the Ukraine War has kicked the deglobalization process into high gear. This calendar year we will experience breakdowns in the supply systems that make industrialized agriculture possible, and not just in Africa. The Middle East and East Asia also face a catastrophic unwinding of the input streams that keep regional populations alive, while major agricultural producers like Australia and Brazil will face challenges far beyond what their systems are capable of tolerating. The result is the same in all of them: lower yields.
 
And lower yields means famine.

Join us March 11 as Peter Zeihan walks us through the end of global agricultural as we know it. It will be a wide-ranging discussion that encapsulates all the many trends in play today, from Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xin Jinping’s cult of personality, to dangerously low energy investment to, of course, the Ukraine War.

REGISTER FOR THE UKRAINE WAR: AGRICULTURE EDITION

Can’t make it to the live webinar? No problem! All paid registrants will be sent a link to access the recording of the webinar and Q&A session, as well as a copy of presentation materials, after the live webinar concludes.