Bolsonaro Flees Brazil Following Election Loss

Bolsonaro with President Donald Trump in May 2026 | Photo by wikimedia commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A1vio_Bolsonaro#/media/File:Donald_Trump,_Eduardo_Bolsonaro,_Fl%C3%A1vio_Bolsonaro,_and_Paulo_Figueiredo.jpg

Brazil just wrapped up its elections with a presidential victory for Lula over Bolsonaro. And if those names sound familiar, it’s because we’ve seen Lula and the Bolsonaro family duke it out for decades.

The latest matchup has escalated the rivalry, with members of the Bolsonaro family seeking refuge in the United States. Brazil, a relatively young democracy, is showing signs of institutional fragmentation. Given its importance as a global supplier of food, energy, and raw materials, these political vulnerabilities extend far beyond Brazil’s borders.

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Transcript

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re gonna talk about what’s going on in Brazil. They’ve recently had a new election, and the guy who lost immediately fled the country, which is generally not a good look. There’s a lot of drama here. It’s Latin America. So let me try to outline what’s going on. 

First things first. The guy who won Lula, this is his fourth term as president. In the past, he’s been in jail for corruption. In fact, in one of his recent election campaigns, he campaigned from jail. So, you know, we’ve got that going on for the clean side. On the other side, we’ve got the Bolsonaro clan, which is where most of the drama is today. Jair Bolsonaro is the guy who has been president. And when he lost to Lula, who was campaigning from jail, he moved to the United States and tried to arrange for a January 6th style overthrow of the government. This is honestly not very controversial, even in Brazil, that he did this. Keep in mind that Brazil is a democracy that only dates back to the 90s, so a lot of their institutions are relatively fragile compared to some of the more advanced countries out there. Anyway, when he returned home, he was convicted and he’s in jail now. The next generation down. His three sons have basically used a lot of their political heft to try to take over the government and free their father. One of them Eduardo, went so far as to go to other governments and get them to put sanctions on specific members of Brazilian courts, as well as general economic sanctions in an attempt to put pressure on the Brazilian government. And if you happen to like the Bolsonaros, you can understand why he would do that. But if you’re willing to take a more broader view, can you imagine what happened if that was in the United States? Like, let’s imagine for the moment that Joe Biden was in jail for something and Hunter Biden went to, I don’t know, China to lobby the Chinese to put sanctions on specific court justice of the Supreme Court and then economic sanctions on the United States, and then touted that they won’t be coming off until such time as his father is released. That’s basically what went down with Brazil, just that the country on the other side was the United States, which means it’s been wrapped up in MAGA drama in the United States. Anyway, the case against him is very strong, although I can’t say that he’s 100% guilty because the court systems in Brazil work differently from the United States. There’s kind of this merger between attorneys general and the court, so the judges actually can lead investigations. Anyway, he is now living in self-imposed exile in the United States, and if he returns, he’d probably be arrested pretty quickly. The next son down is Flavio. That is the one who ran for president this most recent time. His corruption allegations are a little bit more pedantic. They involve corruption, money laundering and private business issues. Again, the case is under a degree of judicial lock and key, so all the information isn’t there. But he clearly felt that he needed to flee the country within hours of losing the election. And he is now in the United States as well. Let’s see, who does that leave us with, Eduardo, Flavio, Carlos. Carlos Bolsonaro. Still in the United States. He’s an elected senator in the Brazilian government. And his supposed charge is that during his father’s administration, he used and directed the intelligence systems in Brazil to actively monitor the personal communications of a lot of opposition lawmakers. There is no argument on either side that that happened. The argument is the degree to which Carlos directed it personally, because, you know, this is a public institution. So the records are there. They know it was done. Carlos is just saying, oh, it just happened to happen. It wasn’t me, you know, bullshit. But anyway, bottom line is we’ve got this family of people who was trying to manipulate the system for their own political needs, which doesn’t absolve the other side at all. I just have to underline that if this had been flipped and Lula had three kids that were doing this, we’d probably be just doing the same video with different names. 

The reason I wanted to bring this all up is two things. Number one, this is wrapped up in the Trump administration right now. Trump has had a long, brutal series of domestic and foreign policy defeats, and he’s scrambling for anything that makes him feel good. We’re really at that stage now. And because Trump has been manipulating Brazil on and off for the last couple of years with help from the Bolsonaros, this is now rising to the level of front page news in the United States as well. Second issue. As I mentioned, Brazil’s political system as a democracy is relatively new, only goes back to the 90s. They have done a pretty good job until about ten years ago of finding their way forward as a young democracy. But now this blood feud between Lula and the Bolsonaros has basically become a Hatfield-McCoys sort of situation. And it’s brought in the courts and it’s brought in the intelligence system, its broad and foreign affairs, and we are looking at a top to bottom fissure in the capacity of the Brazilian state to function in an in a nonpolitical manner. That’s a real problem because Brazil is the second largest country in population in the Western Hemisphere. It is right up there with Mexico in terms of its overall economic heft, and it is a global producer of pretty much everything that the world needs right now, whether it’s food or energy derivative products or mining products, you know, the sort of things that you really need if you need to expand industrialization because we’re going to lose globalization. What happens here really matters to a great number of people. And right now, because of this blood feud, it looks like the whole system is starting to crack. I don’t want to say they’re going to fail. We’re nowhere near that. And they had a really strong track record until 10-15 years ago. But Brazil has absolutely entered the danger zone of states that are fracturing under pressures, internal and external. And no matter how that goes, it’s going to matter to a great number of people, including us.

How Will the Elections Impact Serbia and Brazil?

A ballot box with a checkmark on the paper going in it

Both Serbia and Brazil just had major elections, but neither is likely to change much. Unfortunately, these are two countries bound by their respective geographies, and it will require much more than an election to alter their trajectories.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a foggy Colorado, it is the 26th of October, and we had a whole host of fun things over the weekend. A couple big elections that I want to talk about. 

The first one was in Serbia. Now Serbia is a Balkan country stuck in the middle of the Balkan Peninsula. It is right along the Danube and has served as a choke or a springboard for navigation and commerce throughout the region for centuries now. It used to be part of the former Yugoslavia, if you remember that one from the Cold War, which broke up at the end of the Cold War and triggered a combination of war, civil wars and secessionist wars and ethnic cleansing that killed a minimum of 150,000 people, probably a lot more based on whose numbers you’re using. 

Anyway. A guy by the name of Vučić, yes, that is mispronounced because there are way too many accents on that name. Basically lost. He’s been in charge for most of the past 30 years, directly or indirectly, or as president or as Prime minister, and he has now been kicked out of the party by a group called Student List. One of the fun things about Serbia is it has had a very, very active actually, this is the entire former Yugoslavia, very, very active student political movement and not like student movements in the United States, like the Young Republicans, that just kind of pop up in their adjuncts to the parties or in, say, South Korea, where they just like to protest, no, no, no, these guys actually have heft and they form coalitions that actually are designed to and often do, influence who gets elected and sometimes even run their own candidates as they did. This time the group is called Student List. And it’s not just a bunch of young kids or professors. It includes, for example, a former central bank chief. Anyway, Student List has won the elections very cleanly, Vučić has already accepted the results, and so they’re going to be forming a new government now with a majority of the seats in the parliament. Serbia has always kind of had its position of one foot in the west and one foot in the east. The Serbs are Slavs, and so they have always kind of served as a position for a Russian power projection into the region, up to and including during the civil and the genocidal wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The question that everyone in Europe is having is now that the Vučić is gone, whether or not there’s going to be more pro-European orientation and a more anti-Russian orientation. And I wouldn’t bet on that. 

A couple of things to keep in mind. Number one, the population is Slavic, Serbs are Slavs. And so there is a degree of ethnic connection to the Russians. It doesn’t mean that they have to do what the Russians say, but to think that they’re just going to ignore it for the purposes of a domestic political election is a bit of a stretch. Second, what little this election has been about foreign affairs. It really hasn’t touched on changing foreign affairs. This is an election about domestic reforms and economic restructuring and removing some of the corruption from the system. You know, all issues we’ve heard before and moving on. Keep in mind that since the Yugoslav wars ended, Serbia’s kind of been on the outside. Every other member of the former Yugoslavia is well on its way to EU and NATO membership, and several of them have already made it. Serbia has just kind of been stuck in the 1990s, and it’s just had a hard time figuring out what it wants. And if all it’s going to do is channel Russian or Chinese influence, that really doesn’t take them very far, especially now that Bulgaria and Romania and Slovenia and Croatia are all in the EU already, and even places like Albania, God have made it into NATO. Anyway, their foreign policy push for the Student List is to finish the negotiations with the EU and then put it to a referendum, which, you know, duh, but that’s about all they have discussed as regards to the West, the position on, say, the Ukraine war is no sanctions on Russia and pushing for an end of the war. Not exactly a break with where we’ve been. So if you were looking for this to be a big shift, it only is if you’re interested in domestic Serbian politics, if you’re looking at the broader international field, they either are sticking with more or less where the previous government was, or they have to make it up still, it’s a new government. We’re probably not going to find out this year, but don’t expect radical changes. 

The other big one was in Brazil, where we had a bit of an upset. We had two people running Bolsonaro, who was the son of the previous Bolsonaro, who was president, and Lula, who is the same guy who was president before and before and before. This is an election that has been like fingernails on a chalkboard for me, because we’ve had Lula versus a Bolsonaro now for basically this century. And Brazil is a country that’s a little difficult to operate because there’s an uplift on the coast and all the people and all the economy is in the inland. And so getting the infrastructure to get everything out to the coast is always been a royal bitch.  And over the last 25 years, they have built more infrastructure to make it a little bit easier. But it’s still kind of difficult. And so you get this giant country with just under 200 million people I believe, that just punches way below its weight in regional affairs, much less global affairs. But everyone is convinced it’s the shit. It is not the shit. It is not shit either. But it’s not great. And an election between basically the same two cults isn’t going to do anything. I’m not a fan of either of them. The Bolsonaro family is the group that says that the real problem with the Nazis is that they were just too soft on the domestic foes. God. And then Lula is, at best a poor manager, who’s not been very good at using the tools of the state to actually push economic development. He spent a lot of money on a lot of things in Brazil for its class, you know, large, diversified developing countries, has by far the highest debt of that class. According to their numbers, it’s 82% of GDP, according to the IMF it’s probably closer to 100%. And that is arguably not survivable. That will almost certainly require a debt restructuring, probably during this next term. And we haven’t had a large developing country go down the debt tubes for quite some time now. And now that everyone in the world is facing some sort of debt crisis, this could very well be the country that ticks off that crisis. Or if it gets ticked off somewhere else. This is a country that is looking at a very, very deep problem. The Lula team has never been good at finances. The Bolsonaro team is not going to let go. And so basically we have been in this tug of war that’s kind of like the US culture war for about 15, 20 years, and it is going to continue. 

So I hate to say it, despite all the talk in both of these countries and around both of these countries about what a landmark election this was, it really wasn’t. It’s just the next step along the road in countries that were trapped by their geography. Not a whole lot has changed. Sorry.

Why Do the Democrats Keep Losing Ground?

Symbol of Democratic party cut out of paper

The future of the Democratic Party in the US isn’t looking too bright. When strategy and targeting don’t change for over half a century, I suppose that’s what they get.

The Dems traditional coalition was made up of organized labor, ethnic minorities, and coastal elites…which accounts for nearly 70% of the population. On the numbers alone, they should be crushing it. Yet the Democrats continue to lose ground in elections. There are several things at play here.

The educated urban liberals aren’t as unified as assumed, so the issues they champion often fail to resonate with the working class. Minorities that the democrats once turned to for numbers, like the Hispanic demographic, are now gaining wealth and leaning conservative. And many immigrants come from religious and socially conservative countries, which contributes to the drift of previously reliable Democratic voters over toward the GOP.

Democrats are realizing that their coalition is too fractured to win. Demographics won’t cut it. And counting on enough people hating Trump clearly isn’t a viable strategy either. Something big needs to change if the Democrats want a future in American politics.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today. We’re taking a question from the Patreon page. And it’s about US politics. So we, specifically the question is, is there a future for the Democratic Party in the United States? And the short version is probably not. Just to review the Democratic Party is not what it used to be. 

It has been through several iterations since it was formed back in the 1800s. But in its most recent iteration, one that dates roughly back to, the post-World War two environment, the party basically formed around three big pillars of voters. The first is organized labor, with capital being on the Republican side of the equation. The second are ethnic minorities, with most white people edging towards the Republicans again. 

And then the third group is coastal elites, specifically of the White Tower crowd, people who live in cities and have a very different way of looking at the world than, say, rural voters who are more likely to be Republicans. Those three categories are the bulk of the system. And if you look at it just on the numbers, if you add up all racial minorities in the United States with all organized labor or blue collar workers, with everyone who’s living in the cities, it’s a super majority of the population. 

It’s pushing 70% of the total. It should, by the numbers, not only be the dominant party, but it should be the only party in the United States. And yet and yet and yet they keep losing elections by ever more impressive margins. Why? Well, a couple things to keep in mind. Number one, politics evolve. Remember, this isn’t the first form the Democrats have been in. 

I believe this is the fourth. And to think that it is static for all times is silly. Second, politics evolve in terms of the issues. Technology pushes people on different sides of the win loss ledger. Economic transformation can make some states or urban centers rise while others fall. Changes in technology change how we interact with the world. And all of these things have happened at scale in the last 35 years. 

I mean, just think about what we’ve been through since 1985. We had the nuclear scare of the Cold War than the collapse of the Cold War, than the rise of China. We’ve had the baby boomers being the predominant factor in American politics as they were entering their adult years, and now they’re all retiring, changing the financial and the budgetary shape of the entire country. 

We’ve had the onset of the digital revolution and the rise of social media, changing how we all interact with one another. Of course, we’re going to manage our politics differently, but for the Democrats, this has not been a gift. Three basic things have combined to make it nonfunctional in its current form. First, those liberal, coastal educated urban living elites are not nearly as united as you might think. 

And more importantly, they have a hard time resonating their ideas with the rank and file of the United States. Most Americans do not own six figures. Most Americans have not graduated from graduate programs. And so the sort of tunnel vision that you can get if you’re a part of this coastal elite, just doesn’t really carry out to others. 

And when you see people starting to protest for trans rights, that just doesn’t resonate for most of the country. The second issue is racial. One thing that defines your average American is race white, black, Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American Islander mix however you want to call it. And it has been an important aspect of American identity. But it’s not the only one, and it often finds itself clashing with other aspects of identity. 

Your education level, your region, where you’re from, how you define your sense of self, whether you’re gay or straight. All of these things are muddled together along with economic issues to give us all our sense of self. And one of the huge mistakes the Democratic Party has made over the last 30 years is to simply bet that because birth rates were higher under Hispanics than they were under whites, the country was going to become more and more and more leftist, more and more democratic. 

And that’s simply one measure. Instead, we saw two things happening with specifically the Hispanic population. Number one, they became steadily and steadily more wealthy, which tends to put them over into the Republican camp. And second, Hispanics, especially first and second generation Mexican Americans, are very strong in blue collar work, specifically the trades like electricity and welding and similar items. 

Construction. Think, well, the United States is going through an industrial renaissance where those skill sets are massively in demand. And so if you want to look at politics through the lens of the economic haves and have nots, the Hispanics have become more and more in the category of the have moving forward. So for them, tax rates have become as important, if not more for most then things like racial equality. 

And so more and more of these people have shifted over in the general direction of Trump style Republicans. And the third issue is cultural. If you’re a first or second generation Mexican-American, a first or second generation, immigrant from any background. Odds are that where you came from is less organized than the United States and less wealthy. 

You came to pursue the American Dream, which means you have some first hand experience in your family. Of what? A system with weak rule of law looks like. One of the great things that we have forgotten in this country is that most migrants have a deeper degree of religious RCD than most Americans. And so when you get a Mexican immigrant or Nigerian immigrant and they come to the United States, they are far more likely to be socially conservative than, say, the social liberals of the coasts. 

So we have all of these things happening at the same time, changing our idea of identity. And the net result is a lot of factions that used to be core to the Democratic coalition are now Tossups. Hispanics were as likely to vote for Trump as they were likely to vote for Harris. Same for people under age 30. The youth are now in play as well. 

You pull this all together and at the moment it is absolutely impossible for the Democrats to win any big election unless there’s something else very big in play. Does this mean that the Democrats are dead forever? Not quite what I’m saying. What I’m saying is they can no longer count on winning by the numbers. There has to be another issue out there that motivates. 

And the general unpopularity of Donald Trump is something that the Democrats today are counting on. But as we learned in our last federal elections, that is not enough.

The Americans Didn’t Vote With Their Wallets

Picture of a pen next to a voter ballot

Well, it looks like American politics got drunk at the holiday party and forgot who it was. Exit polls from the latest election show a significant shift in voting patterns.

People didn’t vote with their wallets, but instead focused on cultural issues. So, the traditional breakdown of wealthier individuals voting Republican and lower-income voters leaning Democrat has gone out the window.

With both parties weak and focused on issues that fail to resonate with voters, people are choosing the candidate they perceive to be the lesser of two evils. This voting dynamic should correct itself in the next few election cycles (political alignments based on income should re-emerge), but a new party system in the US is likely on the horizon.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan coming to you from New Zealand. And now that I’m safely in another country, I’ve got to do something about U.S. politics I thought I should share. We now have pretty good exit polling from all 50 states, and I can safely say that we’ve had a significant change, not just in voting patterns, but in organizational patterns for the US, politically. 

Traditionally, when we think about the last 70 years of our by party system, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican. It’s the party of business and wealth. And if you’re working class or poorer on the dole, you’re more likely to vote Democrat, which is the party of the working man and the minorities. 

Yeah, that fell apart completely in this election and this election, regardless of what your income was up to, once you got into the 1%, they don’t track you anymore. So basically half $1 million or less had no bearing whatsoever. Every individual income category was within an eight point spread, right? Clustered around 50%, for who voted for who. 

So for the first time in American history and only one of a very rare number of times in global history, economic mix and income don’t shape your political leanings. Now, this isn’t sustainable. It’s fun for an election and maybe two and, it means a couple things. Number one, it means that the culture war is a big determining factor in how people vote. But more importantly, the idea that business and unions and rich and poor don’t shape our politics is, of course, asinine. So how people redefine how their income matters to them politically is probably gonna determine how we get out of this political mess that we’re in right now. 

Because right now we’ve got two very small, very brittle parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party that are clustered around a very short list of issues that most of the country honestly doesn’t care about all that much. And we’ve been presented with a series of, voting for the lesser of two evils. Now, for me, as an independent, I’m comfortable with that. 

I’ve been doing that a long time. But for everybody else, it’s a shit show. So we’re going to see this shift over the next election cycle or two, and money will come back into it, for better or for worse income. We’ll come back to it. Identity. We’ll come back to it from an economic point of view. And then we get a fundamentally new party system. 

What will that look like? I have no idea. Literally, this has never happened before in American history. So we have no examples whatsoever to judge by. But I can guarantee you that we’re all going to find out together, and it’s going to be really uncomfortable.

America After the Election: Foreign Policy & Does Turkey Have the Power to Control Israel’s Future?

A 2020 electoral college map

America After the Election: Foreign Policy

Listen, I debated even entertaining an election video for today, but since this question was so good, I just had to record one.

The question is: what aspects of American foreign policy are going to stick with us regardless of who wins the presidential election? The answer is not as eloquent.

I’m sure that not one of you will like what I had to say and that’s fineeeee, because as long as I pissed off everyone, I should be in the clear…and I coincidentally planned an international trip, so enjoy! Muahahahah!

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Does Turkey Have the Power to Control Israel’s Future?

Israel has had a lot of eyes on it lately and many are starting to wonder what the future looks like for this small and arid country. Let’s break this down through the lens of deglobalization.

With US involvement and globalization set to decline, Israel could be losing a very valuable partner. Remember that the US has supported Israel with critical resources like food and energy, as well as on the security and military fronts. That leaves some pretty big shoes to fill.

I don’t want to discredit Israel entirely because they have established themselves as a technological power, but that can only take them so far. The main shortcomings being energy, food, and protection. Thankfully there are some viable options out there.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have already begun working together and I would expect that to continue. Turkey, who will take some convincing to enter into a partnership, would be a powerful addition to the team (Turkey is poised to be the regional leader moving forward, thanks to its military and economic power). And then we’ll throw in Egypt to round out the roster.

I don’t want to put too much stress on this, but if Israel can’t figure out its relationship with Turkey…the Israeli future could look bleak.

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Transcript #1

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, well we are two-thirds of the way through our first ten inches of snow for the season. Ooh. Happy election day to everyone. I had considered just letting this pass and just dealing with the crap that’s going to inevitably happen after. But I got a really good question from one of the Patreon crowd members.

So I figured I would take a shot at it, before I leave the country for a couple days. So, the question is this: what aspects of American foreign policy are going to stick with us regardless of who wins the presidential election? Great question. I do not have a great answer. In the world until roughly…

Oh, let’s call it 2012. We had something in the United States, when it came to foreign policy and strategic policy, called the bipartisan consensus. And the idea was that the Soviet Union was bad. Global communism was not a great idea. And the way for the United States to secure its security, as well as its economic well-being, was to build an alliance network that would span the world and pursue a free-trade world,

a globalized world with everyone so that most countries of consequence would have a vested interest in benefiting from participating in the American security agreements rather than going and doing something else. And that gave us NATO and the Japanese and the Korean, the Taiwanese alliances, and all of that, and built the nonaligned world into an economic powerhouse that wasn’t necessarily aligned with the United States, but really wasn’t aligned with anyone else either.

Broadly worked. But then in 2012, we had eight years of a visceral disinterest in governing, by Barack Obama. And then we got Donald Trump and Joe Biden, who were two of the most economically populist presidents we’ve ever had. And over that 16-year period, the bipartisan consensus has withered away. And the party that was responsible for basically writing most of the real policies, the Republican Party, has now

found itself in a different place with the national security conservatives and the business conservatives not really even part of the party architecture any longer.

And there are some factions of the Republican Party that are finding themselves very strangely aligned on some issues with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. So, to say that security policy is no longer up for grabs in the United States is not paying attention to what’s really going on. What that means is the United States is in a period of flux, not just politically, internally, but internationally.

Now, this is the topic of a lot of my workings,

Starting with The Absent Superpower and The Accidental Superpower ten years ago. But what we’re seeing in the United States is also churning other things, which means that very few of the things that we consider to be normal national security and economic precepts are likely to survive because the institutions of the parties that formed them are themselves up for grabs.

And we’re seeing the leadership of both the Democratic and the Republican Party taking the institutions into a nonfunctional era. They will reform, and we will get to a situation where we can have a meaningful conversation about foreign policy again, but it’s probably not going to be for a few more years. So we’re stuck with what we have.

So let’s start with the Democrats and Kamala Harris. How can I say this without sounding like a complete prick? She’s an empty suit. Kamala Harris’s only job experience before she became vice president was being a prosecutor, which is, you know, better than the last three presidents, but it’s still not a lot. It’s a relatively minor view of anything.

And so when you look at anything she’s going to say about anything, she’s never actually implemented anything. And so you have to take everything with a big block of salt. In her first year as vice president, she was at Joe Biden’s side in every press conference, every summit, every meeting, and it got to the point that Biden’s staff decided that, no, we don’t want her around.

So they gave her a task that they knew she would fail at and gave her no power to carry it out. And that was going down to solve the border. And so, lo and behold, it was a failure. And then they were able to shovel her off to the side for the next two and a half years until it turns out she’s the presidential nominee.

So if you are voting for Kamala Harris, do not fool yourself. You are voting for an unknown, somebody with very limited experience, and who will come into the White House without a circle of people around her who are competent. They’re going to be people she’s picked up, people who are not loyal to her personally, most likely.

And so it really is a crapshoot. And then, of course, we’ve got the Republican side. And I’m going to put aside for the moment most of my feelings on Donald Trump on strategic issues. I would just ask you to look at really any of his interviews or rallies

in the last three weeks, especially the one that was in Michigan two days ago.

The degradation that I saw during the debate with Biden was in full swing, and this guy is just not all there anymore. So even if he does become president, he probably won’t be for very long. Keep in mind that he is older now than Joe Biden was when Joe Biden became president. And the mental fortitude required for the job is immense.

And Trump just doesn’t have it. So don’t kid yourself. If you’re voting for Trump, you’re actually voting for JD Vance. And JD Vance is even more of an empty suit than Kamala Harris. He’s also a bit of a chameleon, which I don’t know if it’s a plus or minus. He wrote a somewhat famous book,

Hillbilly Elegy, a few years ago, and since then, he’s partially repudiated what he said.

And then he said that Donald Trump was a horrible person, should never be president, and was a danger to democracy. And he’s obviously repudiated that. This is a guy who will say anything to get closer to power. And if Trump wins, he will be the next president. So we’ve got two candidates here who both seem to be fairly economically populist, both of which have no experience in the real world,

and no experience in government—very limited, anyway. And that’s what’s on the docket. So any sort of institutional loyalties are weak to none. Any sort of policy experience that might give us an idea of what they might prioritize is negligible. And so any sort of policies that might have consistency, from the last 20 years to the next four, it’s going to be a short list.

The issue with foreign policy in the United States is that most of it is a presidential prerogative, and it’s very rare that Congress has any say in any of it, at least in the formative stages. And so if we don’t know who, institutionally speaking, politically speaking, ethically speaking, the next president is going to be because there’s no track record,

we don’t know what they’re going to prioritize at all, and we don’t know how they would react to any hypothetical scenario because they’ve never had to do it before. The only policies that are an exception, then, are issues where the president has chosen to cede a degree of authority to Congress and lock something in with an act of Congress that limits the president’s room to maneuver. Those sorts of policies will probably stick because it would require an act of Congress to overthrow them.

In the case of the United States, that’s a very short list of things. And most are related to trade, of which by far the most important policy that falls into that bucket is NAFTA. Now

I’ve made no bones about my general dislike of Donald Trump on any number of issues, but what he did with NAFTA 2 renegotiation, I thought, was brilliant because it was the right thing at the right time with the right partner.

Mexico has become our number one trade partner. And if there is a future for the United States economically, outside of being locked into a very dangerous and unequal relationship with China, Mexico will be the core of whatever that happens to be. And so having the hard work done already, and having it be the isolationist right of the United States that did the negotiations, I thought was great.

So no matter who becomes president next, I think NAFTA is fine. And honestly, that is the single most important foreign policy priority the United States has. So at least when it comes to preparing for whatever is next in the world, as the Chinese become more belligerent and as they start to fall apart, as the Ukraine war crescendos and we face the Russian demographic dissolution as the European

fractures because the population there is making it very difficult for them to do anything else.

The most important single piece of our future was done by Donald Trump, and he deserves credit for that. And I don’t think that whoever his successor is—Harris or JD Vance—is going to have the political authority or interest in overturning that. So, you know, hurray. Now, with that said, I have now probably thoroughly pissed off everybody on both sides.

You should go vote. And you should know that by the time you’re seeing this video, I’m already out of the country, so have a good one.

Transcript #2

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the coast of South Carolina. Several of you have written in on our Patreon forum with questions about what the future of Israel will be, especially as the world de-globalizes. Well, a little background, and then we’ll go into it.

So, number one: Israel is not a big place. We’re talking about a country that’s roughly the size of New Jersey, in a large neighborhood that is pretty arid and not exactly full of friends. Yes, Israel has built a surprisingly dynamic society with an amazing level of technological acumen, but it didn’t do it alone. The question is whether it can sustain itself; it’s basically a de facto sponsorship of the United States from the beginning. And while, for example, its missile defenses are impressive, the real ones—the ones that intercept the ballistic missiles, the arrows—have never functioned without American participation in terms of targeting, tracking, and even, you know, firing.

So, by far the most capable state of the region, but the PA isn’t exactly high. Here’s a country that imports the vast majority—over 80%—of its energy. And despite all the talk, a kibbutz is something like three-quarters of its food as well. So it’s in kind of a pickle. It requires foreign sponsorship for security and it requires access to economies outside of the region for its energy and its food. You remove the United States as the security guarantor, or you remove globalization, and this should, in theory, be one of those countries that, without a radical change of affairs, is simply going to dry up and blow away.

Now, I don’t think that is Israel’s future because a few things are going to change, some of which already have. One of the things that so frustrates the United States about Israel is it acts on its own. It has agency. When you are so much more technically capable and have so much more reach than your neighbors, you have some options. And the Israelis often exercise that. They often engage in military and paramilitary operations that are directly opposed to U.S. interests. And because of that, the Israelis have this view that no ally is worth forever. If push comes to shove, you do what you feel you need to do. And if it happens to piss off the person who ensures you get fed and the lights come on and the missiles get shot down, well, that’s so be it.

They know that at some point down the road they’re going to have to do things differently. And while they probably can’t do it on their own, that doesn’t mean that they can’t find a new friend. So, the question is, who are the candidates?

Well, in terms of energy, I would argue that they’ve already found that one. Starting over 15 years ago, the Israelis basically built a de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia would provide them with some intel on Iran and some energy. And in exchange, the Israelis would provide the Saudis with backdoor access to American weapons systems that the Americans were willing to sell to Saudi Arabia, along with the training that was necessary so they could use them. In addition, anything that involves Iran, the two of them will operate pretty closely.

Now, this doesn’t mean they get along on everything. Obviously, when it comes to the Palestinians, there are still some fine details to work out. But the two of them get on pretty well behind the scenes and publicly spout a lot. But behind the scenes, they’re actually getting along great; they’re reasonable friends. Agriculture is easier. There are a lot more countries in the region that provide food surpluses, most notably in Europe. So it’s not like the Israelis need access to the globalized system to keep the food flowing.

But when it comes to security, that basically tells you where they’re going to get their food. Every country in the Middle East is in the process of wondering when the United States will pull back and, if so, who they should go to. And none of the options are particularly good if you’re an Arab. If you consider that the French and the Brits and the Turks have all had colonial empires in the region, no one really wants to go back to that day. But if you’re Israeli, you’ve got some options because the Israelis were never really a traditional colony; it was formed by the Zionist movement in the aftermath of World War II.

Partnering up with France, or Britain, or in my opinion, Turkey, is something that can be done with a minimum of cultural pain. Of the three, the most likely candidate will be Turkey—not because it’s the closest cultural cousin; it’s the opposite. But if Turkey is not a friend, then Turkey will most likely be an enemy. And having an alliance with someone against your local foe puts you really at the mercy of your ally. But if the Israelis can find a way to bury the hatchet with the Turks, then you take the largest economy and military in the area, with the most projection-based economy and military in the region, and you get a very powerful pairing.

That’s going to be pretty easy to justify joining. So I think the future of this region is likely to be Turkish-led, to a degree Israeli-managed, Saudi-fueled. And those three will have no problem bringing in Egypt as a big bulwark partner in North Africa. That quad is likely to be the power center for this region in a post-American system. And they have everything that all of them need—energy, security, naval access, food, and a really good network of intelligence systems.

I know a lot of you are going to say, “Wait a minute, doesn’t the Turkish government hate Israel right now?” Yes. I didn’t suggest any of this was going to be easy. The issue is that the Turkish government can protect Israel from, say, France or Britain, but France or Britain can’t really protect Israel from Turkey. So there’s really not a lot of strategic choice here. You know, if you’re Saudi Arabia, the idea of reaching out to a distant power like Japan or China makes a degree of sense. But for Israel, the potential foe is near and present. So if Israel cannot find a successful way to get along with Turkey, then Israel will vanish.

This is a region that is actually pretty easy for the Turks to get at. They’re not too far away. They only have to punch through Lebanon, and Lebanon is not really going to fight back. Not to mention you’re going to talk about a really meaningful blockade that would starve Israel of food and energy as well. Far better to find a way to get in bed with the Turks than the other way around.

So again, never said this would be easy. Never said there wasn’t a lot of work to do.

Yes, We Have to Follow Elections in Europe Too

hand placing a ballot in a box in front of on an EU flag

*This video was recorded last week, prior to Peter departing on his backpacking trip (and prior to Biden leaving the race).

Today, we’ll be looking at the recent European Commission presidential election and its broader implications for the Europeans.

Former German Defense Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, will remain as president for the next term. She has been in office through the Ukraine War and has kept a tight grip on many policies coming out of the Commission.

 

The President serves as a crisis mediator among European countries and handles issues requiring unanimity and majority voting. Ursula von der Leyen has prioritized the Green New Deal, cyber defense, and a common EU air defense system (which is top of mind for everyone).

There’s lots of moving parts throughout Europe right now, so von der Leyen will have her hands full. Specifically, we should expect to see significant changes to the EU-NATO relationship and European security dynamics.

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.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we’re doing a video that’s a reminder that it’s not just elections in the United States that matter this year. We just had elections for the European Commission president. And I know, I know, I know, you’re like, really, the election of the chief bureaucrat in Europe? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

But, hey, it matters. So, Ursula von der Leyen, a former defense minister of Germany, was elected to be the president of the Commission a few years ago. She’s now been reelected with a fairly strong majority. I would argue she’s done a decent job overall, considering that she’s been presiding over the European Union during the entirety of the Ukraine war and has emerged as a bit of a hawk on most policies.

The leader of the European Commission is basically responsible for two things. Number one is managing the bureaucracy that is in the European Union, which is very small by European standards, but technically it has legal authority over most of what happens in Europe. Second, to basically serve as a crisis mediator among the various European countries. There are a lot of issues in Europe that require unanimity.

And when you’ve got countries as small as Malta and as large as Germany all having functionally one vote, it requires a lot of proactive work on the part of the executive. Other issues in Europe are decided by something called qualified majority voting, in which it’s kind of a hybrid voting structure where states, based on their population size and their economic strength, have more of a say than others.

It still favors the small states a little bit like America’s electoral college, but it’s a lot more nuanced. And, of course, it’s done European style, so it’s more complicated than it needs to be, and someone has to ride herd over all of that. And that is von der Leyen’s job, and now will be for another few years. The reason I wanted to shortlist this topic specifically, though, is in her final pitch before the vote happened, she indicated what her priorities were going to be.

And, you know, a lot of it is the normal stuff: Green New Deal, cyber defense, all that good stuff. But one that really stuck out, both to me and to the members of Parliament, was her assertion that the EU now needed to create a common air defense space. Now, there are two institutions that have dominated Europe for the last 75 years.

The first is the European Union itself in its various forms, starting with the coal and steel community, turning into the European Community, and now the European Union. Its job has pretty much always been economic integration: the creation of a common trading bloc, the creation of a common market, eventually getting into banking and financial regulation, all that good stuff.

And in that, the European Union, in my opinion, has actually done a lot better than I thought it was going to do 25 years ago. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems. Oh, my God, there are so many problems. There’s so much drama. But it’s still there, and it’s still kicking, and they’ve been making more than incremental progress.

Especially since the financial crisis of the mid-2000s. So, you know, give credit where it’s due. The second big institution is NATO, which has always been American dominated. Or if you want to be really kind, American-British dominated, and it’s responsible for defense issues primarily, but not exclusively, versus the Soviet Union and now the Russians. Now, NATO was kind of on its back foot in the 2000s and 2010s, when most Europeans didn’t see any security problems anywhere. Even with the Russian invasion of Ukraine dating back to 2014, a lot of Europeans, the Germans most notably, just tried to pretend that didn’t happen.

And so NATO was fading because the Americans were getting frustrated. The Europeans weren’t taking European security seriously. And the Europeans didn’t think security was an issue at all. In fact, we got to a point just before the Ukraine war where the Germans were actually openly, publicly talking about dismantling their military completely, which would have been, you know, monumentally stupid, but anyway.

Von der Leyen’s discussion of an air defense space is really interesting. It’s not that it’s not necessary. It’s not that it’s not needed. The Europeans are looking at the Ukraine war and are getting a little pale. They realize that their system is much more integrated. It’s much more dependent upon energy and electricity than anything going on in Ukraine.

I mean, Ukraine, I don’t want to call it a failed state or anything like that, but on the technological scale, the industrial development scale, it is significantly below anyone in Europe. And so the Europeans know that if the sort of attacks that the Russians are doing daily against Ukrainian infrastructure would have happened somewhere else in Europe, the impact would be an order of magnitude bigger.

There’s just so many more important things in Europe that run on electricity than what you have in Ukraine. That the damage would be immense. And an air defense system, a missile defense system, is really the only way to make that happen. And if you have a Polish, a Slovak, a Latvian, and a Romanian system, that’s great.

But what you really need is integration, especially with things like radars. And since missiles, you know, from the point that they’re launched to the point that they hit, if it’s a few hundred kilometers away, you’re talking about, you know, single digits of minutes. Reaction time is really important. And that has to be all set up ahead of time.

What really stuck out in my mind, though, is that she wants this to be an EU prerogative.

And until now, we’ve only had a few little… well, let’s just call them temper tantrums. That’s what they were when a few countries decided they didn’t like what the United States was doing with its military, so they wanted to form a European answer to NATO.

The problem is that the resources were never there. And anything that you dedicate to a NATO project is automatically not available to be dedicated to an EU project. Well, with the Russians basically launching a genocidal war next door that is a combination of forward scorched earth and kidnapping and sexual assault, the Europeans have found themselves motivated to massively expand their defense spending.

So not only is this likely to help NATO quite a bit, but there actually could be the resources necessary for the European Union to do something in defense on its own. Whether it’s enough is an open question, which means that this is going to go one of two directions. Either number one, the Europeans are going to massively expand the defense spending.

And the worse Ukraine does in the war, the greater the push for that is going to be in order to build a kind of parallel capacity. Or number two, the European Union is going to sign a series of agreements with NATO that basically merge the two from a certain point of view. Now, most of the countries that are in the European Union are also in NATO and vice versa.

And the holdouts are countries like the United Kingdom, which isn’t going to leave NATO, but has a pretty strong position on European defense. The sticklers are going to be the four countries that are members of the EU, but are not members of the military alliance. One of these, Malta, doesn’t have a security concern aside from illegal migration from Africa.

So we can put that one to the side. Another one is Ireland, which kind of has a Canadian approach to defense or like, by the time anything gets to us, the world’s already ended. So we’re just going to free ride on this. The Irish hate me. I’m sure I’ll get that here in no time. But the other two matter a little bit more.

One is Austria, which has been a neutral country because everyone wants it to be neutral. The last time the Austrians started to get into security policy, we got Hitler. So, you know, it’s like the more they simmer down, the better. They’ve got a good relationship with NATO that will probably mean that they can just abstain on everything and let it sail through.

And then the last country that matters is Cyprus, which, you know, has very little to do with the Ukraine war. But if you’re going to have a European defense network, the idea is it’s going to protect against countries that are not in the European Union.

And while everyone’s eyes right now are on Russia, and that’s the whole thing that von der Leyen’s trying to get people agitated about, Cyprus’s primary security concern is Turkey. And so you have this one country that has under a million people who has deep, abiding cultural and military conflicts with a major trading partner of the EU, Turkey, but probably is going to have veto power over all of this.

So even if von der Leyen is able to get the Europeans to come up with the money, even if they can figure out a format in Europe that allows NATO and the European Union to do this side by side, we have one hell of a fly in the ointment here as regards the Cypriots. How will that be sorted out?

God knows. Keep in mind that the last time Cyprus really made the news from a global point of view, it was in the financial crisis of the late 2000s. And in that time, we had huge bailouts for Italy, for Spain, for Hungary, for Greece. There was one for Cyprus too. It was the smallest of all of them.

But because Cyprus is a money laundering center, it became very quickly the most controversial, the most complicated of all of them. And we’re going to see something like that in defense as well. So stay tuned.

Of Course Biden Drops Out While I’m Deep in the Mountains…

The news of President Biden dropping out of the 2024 Presidential race managed to reach me in the mountains of Yosemite National Park; however, I won’t have strong enough service for the foreseeable future to give any kind of update. So, I’ve asked my team to send out an interview I did last week that covers the US political transition and all of its fun inner workings.

In this interview on Liberal Values Lab, we walk through geopolitical trends that affect America’s Political Transition, providing insight into America’s domestic turbulence, and the realignment of America’s political parties.

We discussed the changing dynamics of evolving American political alignments, including the flux of unions, the business community and national security coalitions, surprising new alliances, where they are finding a new home and with whom they are now partnering, the possibility of an open convention for the Democratic Party, the aftermath of the Trump shooting, changing global dynamics, China and Russia’s decline, increasing American isolationism, and when personalities matter.

I hope you enjoy and I look forward to releasing an update on all this when I return from my time in the mountains.

Some more info on the Institute for Liberal Values

The Institute for Liberal Values is a non-partisan and non-sectarian consortium focused on the promotion of individual freedom, rights, and liberty in everyday life. We provide the skills and support required to build community where there has been division, encourage free expression where there has been censorship, and foster optimism where there is fear.

Learn more

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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Official portrait of President Joe Biden courtesy of The White House

Assassination Attempt and A Changing World

Butler County Fairgrounds where the Assassination Attempt of Donald Trump occurred

On Saturday, July 13, there was an attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I’m not here to give you the play-by-play that you can get from the news, instead I want to put this incident into context of the broader political and economic shifts.

America is experiencing a political realignment where party coalitions are breaking up and new factions are emerging. Trump, who has sparked some of these shifts, has both benefited from and lost supporters because of this. I’ve talked extensively about the economic shifts happening, but the global order is collapsing and most economies will be in a flux for a while.

With all this change, you can expect increased political and economic volatility, both domestically and internationally. You can parallel the present day shifts to times like the 1930s or Reconstruction in the US. While these changes might ultimately benefit the US, the transitionary period will be no snoozer…as evidenced by the events on July 13.

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.

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Transcript

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks. It is the 14th of July, and last night Donald Trump was lightly injured in an assassination attempt. I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow of what went down because the details are still very sketchy. It looks like it was a 20-year-old registered Republican who donated money to Democrats, which tells us absolutely nothing.

The Secret Service, of course, will be doing their own investigation in league with local law enforcement and the FBI. We will wait for more details to see where that takes us. But I wanted to put this all into context. There are a lot of things going on in the world right now that suggest we’re going to be in a more politically volatile period.

The first big thing is that America is going through its once-in-every-generation political rearrangement, something that Trump is part of. The Americans have a first-past-the-post, single-member district political system, which means that you vote for a single person who will then represent a very specific geography. You don’t vote for a party. In doing this, American parties tend to be fairly weak, and so they tend to be coalitions of coalitions. You get multiple political factions banding together around a single tent in order to get one more vote than whoever comes in second.

Today, for example, the Republican Party has traditionally been made up of people who are concerned with budget deficits, national security, business regulation, and social conservatives. As technology, demographics, and economic patterns evolve, the factions make less sense. The factions rise and fall within the coalitions, and if things get stressed enough, they end up falling out of the coalition altogether, maybe becoming swing voters or maybe going to the other side. What we’re seeing right now is that in spades for the Republican coalition. The business community, the national security community, and the fiscal community have all been basically ejected from the party, but Donald Trump has been successful in drawing other groups away from the Democratic coalition.

For example, union voters are no longer considered Democrats by their voting patterns, and Hispanics have shifted quite a bit. This is still very much a work in progress. Donald Trump is benefiting from this as much as he is losing from this. But if you think about what’s happened in the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve had the rise of hyper-globalization and now its fall. We’ve had the height of the baby boomers in the workforce and now their retirement. It’s not exactly a shock to think that we are going to manage our political system differently.

So that’s the first big piece: America politically is in movement. Second, the world economically is in movement. The whole point of the post-World War II global consensus was that the Americans would take care of the guns and keep everyone safe. The Americans would open the market and make the global sea safe for everyone’s commerce if, in exchange, you sided with the Americans in the Cold War. That provided the basis for everything from the alliance with Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to NATO. That’s created the world that we know. It’s also created the economic backdrop and the security backdrop that made the rise of China possible, because during the late Cold War, China was one of those allies.

Well, that whole system is breaking down. Two reasons: number one, the Americans can’t pay for it anymore and don’t want to. The Americans have refashioned their navy, so instead of hundreds of ships that can patrol the oceans, they have a few clusters of ships that are really good for fighting wars. So the ability to have that global coverage isn’t there. Americans politically are tired of paying the economic price of keeping the world open for everyone because it’s put everybody else at an advantage versus American workers. That just doesn’t fly in today’s populist era.

The second issue is that when you do economically develop, when you do industrialize, you also urbanize. After seven decades of urbanization, people are having fewer and fewer children around the world. Well, if you have fewer children for seven decades, it’s not that you’re running out of ten-year-olds and twenty-year-olds. You’re running out of fifty-year-olds and increasingly sixty-year-olds. This decade, the 2020s, was always going to be the decade that a lot of countries slipped away from having a workforce that can support the globalized system in the first place. After all, if you don’t have consumption, you don’t have trade.

So this whole system, the American political network, is evolving, and the global economic network is collapsing and reforming. What this all means is there’s a lot of change out there in the way we live, the way we work, who we service with our businesses, and where we get our goods. When things change, people with a vested interest in the system don’t always make it. People get scared, and people get angry. That is when you get violence. We’re going to get it at the state level with a series of military conflicts. The first of those is already happening in Ukraine. We’ll probably get one in China before long. In terms of political change in the United States, that’s when we get our domestic political violence.

It happened in the 1930s with the Great Depression and that political reorientation. It happened with Reconstruction, and it happened with the Civil War. So I don’t want to suggest that this is the beginning of more of the same. I’m saying that the factors that define our world are evolving, and we’re going to change with it. For the United States overall, this is a net gain in many, many ways. But going through the process of getting from where we’ve been and what we’re comfortable with to where we’re going, something that’s unknown, is unfortunately going to generate a lot of stresses along the way. We saw some of that last night.

Photo by Designism, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Should Europe Worry About the French Elections

After the first round of European Parliament elections, the French far-right (represented by the National Rally) had a great showing. President Macron wasn’t too happy with that outcome, so he called snap elections to give his party a second shot at capturing a majority.

There are a few reasons that Macron knew this might yield more favorable results. There is a known shift in voting patterns between first and second round votes, where voters start more emotional and end more practical. There are lots of voting tactics Macron’s party could use to garner some more votes, like removing multiple candidates to prop up a single one. The most important one here was the timing; the other parties didn’t have enough time to pull together strong candidates, so Macron’s party could use that to their advantage. And Macron was right…mostly.

The National Rally took third in the snap elections, Macron’s party took second, and the Left came in first. The French aren’t out of the woods quite yet though. Since none of the factions had a majority to form a government, we’re going to see some French cooperation, and you can expect how that will go.

The threat of political instability within France could prove to be a big problem for the rest of Europe too. Without France (attempting to be) at the helm, and no other countries fit to step into that role, Europe will need to figure something out ASAP.

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
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Transcript

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks in southern Missouri. We’re going to finish up our election series today by talking about one of the most convoluted of the big elections that just happened last week, and that is France.

The backdrop is that a few weeks ago, we had European Parliament elections. The French hard-right, represented by a group that calls themselves the National Rally, did very, very, very, very well. The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, who’s of a more centrist alliance, saw this as a threat and decided to try his hand at snap elections to force the French people to support a more pragmatic government, i.e., his. In a way, it worked out in two rounds of voting. At first, the National Rally did very, very, very, very well. Then they did very, very, very, very badly. Ultimately, they came in third behind a couple of other alliance groups, one on the left, one in the center, supporting Macron.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first reason is that there’s a typical pattern in French voting where, in your first vote in the first round, you vote your heart, and in the second vote, you vote your head. So, the idea is you might vote for what you’re passionate about the first time around, but you’re much more practical the second time around. That was definitely in play. A second reason is that there’s a lot of tactical voting where you could have five, six, seven, or eight candidates contesting the same seat in the first round. In the second round, basically everyone who was third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh dropped out in order to concentrate the oppositional votes to make sure that the National Rally would not get the seat. That meant that the National Rally went from being the faraway favorite to coming in a relatively distant third.

But the third, and far more important reason why the National Rally busted, was simply time. From the point Macron called the elections to the point that we had the first round, it was only two weeks, and then only another week before we had the second round, so they really didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. There are 577 parliament districts in France, and going into these elections, the National Rally really wasn’t a true national party in that they had representation and supporters in every single district. So when they had to come up with 577 candidates, one for each district, one who lived in each district, a lot of times they went with just some activists.

And if you guys are politically wired, you know that there are activists in your party who are wackadoo. There were some wild racists and some wildly incompetent people who found themselves on the ticket for the National Rally, which meant not just that they didn’t have a chance, but the candidates on the left and the center were able to parade these people nationwide and show what fools the National Rally were. At least that was their view. Take this together, especially that last piece, and it worked.

But we’re not out of the woods yet. Remember, there are three big factions here. You had the hard right, the National Rally, you had the centrists around Macron, and then you had this left alliance that is actually four different parties made up of radicals, communists, socialists, and Greens. They had the same problem that the National Rally had; they only had a couple of weeks to build this electoral alliance to contest the elections. While they came in first, they have nowhere near enough seats in parliament to run a government. Nobody does. In fact, if you were to take any of these three factions and throw all the minor parties in with them, there’s still not enough.

So to have a majority government, two of these three factions have to be able to work together. Well, no one wants to work with the National Rally, so that eliminates them. For the new leftist alliance, the single largest chunk is the party of a guy named Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The best way to describe this is he has the personal charm of Marjorie Taylor Greene in the United States, the intelligence of Cori Bush, makes up math like Elizabeth Warren, and has the personality of a cold, hairy pile of vomit. He’s a hateful person, he’s a snake, and no one wants to work with him. But his party in that four-group coalition that is the left alliance is the single largest.

We already have party leaders throughout the leftist alliance saying that Mélenchon is a problem and he will never be prime minister, but he now represents the single largest chunk of seats in parliament as part of that alliance. So we’re entering into something that is very unexpected and unfamiliar for France: political instability. The single largest party in the overall parliament, the National Rally, no one wants to work with. The ruling party that works with Macron has been a little bit discredited. The left is an absolute mess, with its titular leader being a complete moron. There is no clear path forward here.

This isn’t Israel, this isn’t Italy; no one here has experience building coalition governments. According to the French constitution, you can’t have another election to fix this at the ballot box within a year. So you take France, which until now has been the Eurozone country with the single strongest political leadership, and you basically remove it from play until such time as the French can find a way to make this work. I doubt that’s going to happen in this calendar year or next calendar year. This is a really bad time for Europe to not have leadership.

If you look around Europe and see what’s left, the French are out to lunch dealing with their own internal stuff. The Germans have a three-party coalition that is already incredibly weak, led by an even weaker chancellor. The next country down is Italy, which is led by someone on the right, Giorgia Meloni. That means if you’re the United States and Russia at this time, all of a sudden Europe has become a little bit of a piece of taffy to be pulled.

At the moment, because of the Ukraine war, that means the ball is very clearly in the United States’ court. But never forget, this is an election year in the United States too. Whether it’s Biden or Trump, it’s going to be difficult for Washington to focus the kind of attention on Europe that it honestly deserves right now.

So we basically took the last big pillar of European—not solidarity, not leadership, not democracy, but coordination—and we’ve knocked it down. This is going to be a big problem, as you’ll see in the next video, because this is only the beginning of what needs to be done within Europe.

Iran’s President-Elect Sparks Change, But How Much?

Next up on our list of important elections around the globe is the Iranian presidential elections. We’ll be looking at Iran’s new President-elect, Masoud Pezeshkian, and what his victory might mean for the country.

Pezeshkian triumphed over a number of slightly nutty, ultra-conservative, fire-breathing candidates sponsored by the clerical regime (which officially oversees the entire country). This presidential election has also highlighted some of the ongoing issues Iran has faced, especially the economic difficulties caused by US sanctions.

Pezeshkian’s platform follows a more moderate approach than his opponents and predecessors, and suggests a possible shift in domestic policies. As of now, these conversations are focused on smaller issues like the strict enforcement of a dress code for women, but when the majority of the Iranian populace rallies behind something like that…it could mean that something bigger is brewing. It’s far too early to make a call like that, but this is something that I’ll be keeping an eye on.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a rental car in Kansas City. Today, we are going to take a crack at the second piece in our elections series for the week. We had a number of important elections recently. Today, we’re going to cover Iran, where there was a runaway victory for the now president-elect Masoud Pezeshkian. And I apologize for the name. Anyway, he came in with a strong first place. There’s a two-round voting system in Iran, and it’s not really a surprise that he won.

There were any number of candidates in the first round, but five of them were sponsored by the clerical regime of Iran. You know, the slightly nutty, very ultra-conservative, hate-everyone group that runs the country.

Anyway, there were five candidates from that faction, and they were all fire-breathers. So having one moderate ensured that he made it to the second round, where he easily defeated his opponent, who was honestly a complete nutbag. So no surprise there.

But moving away from the tactical political stuff, the situation Iran is in is uncomfortable.

Dial back a little bit. If you remember back to the war in Iraq, the United States was very good at overthrowing the Saddam regime but not very good at making Iraq look like Wisconsin. So Iranian agents were able to step into the void and agitate the Shia population of Iraq. Shia is a denomination within Islam, and the Iranians are predominantly Shia. It’s also the single largest denomination in Iraq.

Saddam’s government was Sunni. So when the United States basically ripped out the apparatus of the old government and wasn’t quick enough in putting something else in its place, Iran was able to partially take over and still remains very influential there today.

During this period, while the United States was going after militants throughout the region, the Shia Iranians were able to step in, displace a lot of groups, cause a lot of trouble, and become very powerful throughout the region. But it wasn’t free. Iran has a financial restriction in that most of its income comes from oil.

So if you can target the oil, you can target Iran. Over the long term—not just days, weeks, or months, but decades—that really cripples them. Over the past 20 years, yes, Iran made a lot of forays, but it generated a lot of expenses.

When Saudi Arabia was roused to combat Iran, Iran was never going to win a game of checkbook diplomacy with a country that exports a fifth as much oil. Then under Obama, the United States put some of the strictest sanctions ever developed against Iran to pressure them into a nuclear deal to curb their nuclear ambitions. Under Donald Trump, who did away with the deal but kept the sanctions in place, these sanctions have now been in place for the better part of the last decade. We are seeing very real impacts on the standard of living in Iran because they haven’t been able to export the volume of oil necessary to sustain a meaningful standard of living within Iran, much less cause trouble throughout the region.

I don’t mean to suggest that Iran’s been curtailed or castrated, but they’re having a hard time doing everything they thought they would be able to do. When you have this sort of economic blindness, you can follow one of two paths. A few years ago, they tried electing a hardliner named Raisi, who everybody hated. He was a mean dude, and even within the clerical establishment, people thought he was too tough. Then he died in a plane crash a few weeks ago.

The new guy, Masoud Pezeshkian, is basically trying the other approach—maybe a little bit of compromise, maybe a more constructive relationship with the West. Now, I don’t want anyone to get too overexcited here. Yes, elections matter in Iran, but only within a certain framework. The most powerful person in Iran is not the president; it is the supreme leader, who remains a bag of snakes and is responsible for all the things you think of when you think of Iran: the clerical theocracy, the oppression of minorities and women, and the general seeding of militant groups throughout the Middle East. None of that has changed.

The new guy is not challenging much of that at all. In foreign policy, he has stated that he still supports Iran having a nuclear program and a hard line in negotiations with the West. He still supports the Houthis in their on-again, off-again conflict with Israel and Hamas against Israel. He still supports militancy throughout the region, but he’s doing it with a much different tone that suggests there might be a little room for compromise here or there. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, but there’s at least a change in mood.

If there is going to be a meaningful difference, it will happen at home. Pezeshkian has been very clear that he thinks the clerical authorities’ law enforcement arm shouldn’t beat women if they show their hair. From a geopolitical point of view, that’s kind of a nothing burger under normal circumstances. But now you have the majority of the population of Iran siding with the president against the people with the guns. That can go in a lot of interesting directions. Keep in mind that you’ve got 10,000 clerics, 10,000 mullahs, that basically rule Iran. It’s a deep bench. I’m not suggesting we’re going to have a revolution, but if the guy who’s nominally at the top, chosen by the people, wants a different approach to living your life in the country, and the people who have been calling the shots up to this point are on the opposite side of that, well, things can get very interesting.

So I don’t want to overplay this. I’m not suggesting a revolution, but for the first time in 40 years, there seems to be a split within the leadership of Iran on what Iran should be at home. And that’s how change starts.

Okay, that’s it for Iran. Tomorrow we’ll deal with France.