Elections Archives - Zeihan on Geopolitics

The Americans Didn’t Vote With Their Wallets

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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For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

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?

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!

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.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

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.

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

*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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan 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.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from the 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.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from 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.

UK Elections: Starting Over

In case you’ve been buried neck deep in US political news, there are some fairly important elections taking place across the globe. For the first country in our little global election coverage, we’ll be looking at the United Kingdom.

The UK has had plenty of ups and downs throughout its history; from emerging as a global financial hub during the industrial revolution, to falling from grace in the post-World War II era, to joining the EU in the 70’s and revitalizing London as a financial center…and then starting the cycle all over again with Brexit. So, what’s the significance of the most recent election?

The Labour party took a nice victory and knocked out 2/3 of the ruling Conservatives from their seats. This will allow the Labour party to steer the direction of the country, but they’ll have their work cut out for them. If we’re going to see the UK regain significance, they’re going to have to undergo a comprehensive economic realignment OR swallow their pride, trade in their tea for coffee, and partner up with North America.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Mica Gulch in Colorado. It is the 8th of July, and I’m taking a quick break from hiking to update everybody on what’s been going on with all these crazy elections. We talked about the United States last week. you know, lots of hate mail from that one. so it’s only fair to cover three other countries that have had elections, over the last few days.

And they’re going to be the United Kingdom, Iran and France. And we’re going to do the United Kingdom today because it’s the simplest of the three, if you can believe that,

In order to understand where we are now, it really helps to start a couple hundred years ago. if you go back before the Industrial Revolution, if you go back before Deepwater navigation, the United Kingdom, or as it was known, England, really didn’t matter all that much. It was a relatively smallish population on a relatively large,

island off the coast of Europe. And most of the mainland countries, especially France, had a far larger population and were far more significant. But when deep water navigation was developed by the Iberians, eventually that technology migrated to a country that could use it better and that would be an island.

And that was the UK. And all the income that came from a deep water navigation empire, forced the United Kingdom to, well, induce the United Kingdom to do two things. Number one, all this income had to be processed and so we got things like the London Stock Exchange and the financial heart and the Square Mile and all the things that make London, London today a place where you process capital, put it into places around the world, will be more and more efficient.

And being the primary global node for the empire meant that it was the primary global node for everyone. Well, that was piece, one piece to all. This capital floating around the United Kingdom, meant that they you had a lot of people who were developing new ideas and eventually that manifested as the Industrial Revolution.

So that is basically what has always made the United Kingdom special, the ability to leverage deep water navigation and to take it somewhere else, to generate the new technologies of industrialization, to create a global financial hub. That is why London is London. That is why the UK is the UK. That is why we think of the UK as a world power.

But of course, history doesn’t stand still. Just as deep water navigation was a new suite of technologies and migrated to a place that could use it better, so too did industrialization, and it went to Germany, which generated the German Reich in time. And it went to the United States, which generates the country that we have here and that we know now, in addition, London was hardly the only financial hub.

Every country that has a mercantile existence or an empire has to have one. It’s just the Brits were first and largest. And if you look across the pond at the United States, you had New York, It started out as, at the mouth of the Hudson, and that was the big economic artery.

And eventually that was linked to the Great Lakes. But eventually you got the Cumberland Road, which dumped a lot of product out in the Chesapeake, which was really close to New York. And eventually the Great Lakes and the Cumberland Road ended up in, the middle of the continent with the Mississippi River system and all of the cargo that went up and down the Mississippi could also use the barrier island changed to make it all the way back to the Chesapeake.

And oh, look at and behold, you’re pretty close to New York again. So without having an empire in the classic sense, New York became the financial hub, primary financial

By some measures, almost only financial for the United States. And so when you get into the post-World War Two environment, things got a little dodgy for the Brits.

What made them special about industrialization had moved on. What made them special about finance had competition. And in the post-World War Two environment, the Americans made it very clear that if you wanted the American security guarantee, all of your colonies had to be able to go their own way. And so the empire that had made London, London one anyway, and we saw a catastrophic drop in the United Kingdom’s, global reach, their standard of living, their significance and their wealth until the early 1970s, when the United Kingdom successfully joined the European Union.

Now, say what you will about the rest of the Europeans. Finance was never their forte. They tended to be more socialist, statist economies. And so when you had all this apparatus of financial strength and London looking for something to do, it was very quickly, it was very quickly able to emerge, not as a global financial hub, but as a European financial hub.

And while they had lost their global empire from a financial point of view, it’s like they got a new one in Europe. And so German, Spanish, French and Italian finance and all the rest came to London. And so from 1970, what year did they get in? 73, 71, early 70s until relatively recently, it was a model that worked really well.

And because of the sheer bulk of Europe and because of the trading, capacity of Europe, London once again was a strong financial hub until a few years ago, when the Brits voted themselves out of the European Union without a backup plan. For the last few years, under the conservative governments of Theresa may and Boris Johnson, and on and on and on, they’ve had like, what, seven GS anyway?

The Brits have basically been trying to have their cake and eat it too, after voting. That cake is illegal. it’s basically what it comes down to. They’ve shut themselves off from the European system and induced the Europeans to grab as much of the financial clout that London used to have as possible. The Americans, of course, have taken more than their fair share as well.

And that just leaves the United Kingdom with what’s generated by the United Kingdom, and then a few stray wasps here and there. They made a go at being the, completely unethical hub, particularly for Russian money. but in the aftermath of the Ukraine war, a lot of that has lost its luster.

And if you want to do Arabic financing, you’re not going to come to London, you’re going to go to Dubai. So all of the financial flows that made London an industrial and a financial hub are pretty much gone. And the last big chunk is gone because the Brits voted themselves out of the system. So what we have now is not so much a shift from the right to the left.

If you guys haven’t seen the election results, they’re pretty damning. the conservatives lost roughly two thirds of their seats. The ruling Conservatives and Labor, which has been in opposition for the last 14 years, basically doubled their seat count and will be able to rule without needing a coalition partner. But this isn’t a shift from conservative policies to liberal policies.

This is simply a reflection of the catastrophic reduction in economic possibilities that Brexit has imposed upon the United Kingdom, and blaming the government, who happens to be in charge.

Whether that is fair and out, of course, is, dependent upon your personal politics. But for the United Kingdom to matter again, one of two things has to happen.

Number one, it needs to join another group, or it is far and away going to be the financial hub. That’s not going to be Europe. They’re not going to get back into Europe. Even if they apply right now, unless they agree to a lot of strictures. That was what induced them to leave in the first place. Or second, they have to have a top to bottom root and branch economic reformation to reflects the fact that the London financial hub is no more.

And what made them special in the industrial era has changed as well. They need a new way to build and they need a new way to process. They need a new way to manufacture and most importantly, they have to have access to a large market to absorb a lot of the output. Considering that the world is globalizing, that’s a really tall offer.

Considering that the Europeans are no longer in a position where they can absorb British goods, and that’s not even an option. The only option is North America, and that means integrating with North America. North America’s terms. That will guarantee an end to London as a financial hub, because under the terms of any trade deal, New York will absorb all of that, and it will certainly restructure what’s left of British manufacturing to satisfy NAFTA goals. And that means a lot of investment into Mexico from the Brits. And that means changing a lot of the norms that the Brits have gotten used to to match American and Canadian norms. So no matter how this goes from here, what has made the United Kingdom special is gone. And what remains to be seen is whether the new government under labor can really wrap their arms and their minds around the scale of the change to the British condition that has to be implemented here. If Britain is going to be anything other than a failing middle power, which is perhaps what the Brits fear more than anything.

The Senior Home Showdown: Delusional Biden vs. Demented Trump

If you watched the presidential debate last week, I’m sure you’re really, really excited for the election this year! Since so many of you wanted me to talk about this fever dream we’re living in, I figured we’d do it on Independence Day.

For those that didn’t catch the debate, you can just head to your local retirement home and get the same experience from a couple of relics living there. The gist is that neither of these candidates are fit for office and a vote for either of them is a threat to national stability. Great Grandpa Biden – I mean President Biden – revealed how much his cognitive abilities have declined, slipping deeper into his deluded state. Trump was off in his demented-fairyland-state where lies are currency and angry tantrums are the status-quo.

At the end of the day, not much has changed since my first prediction.

The “true” independents will play a critical role in deciding the outcome of this election. Biden still has the upper hand, but Trump isn’t going down without a fight – and his cult followers will be sure of that. There is an opportunity for Biden to step down and have a more qualified candidate step up at an open convention, as long as its not someone like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. And let’s be realistic, no other Republican candidates can challenge Trump’s grip on the party.

So, in all likelihood we’re looking at a 2020 rematch, with candidates who are four years older, less capable, and more embarrassing than before. Would someone be able to pinch me?

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from the lost wilderness in Colorado. I’m just outside of Devil’s Playground.

I was backpacking in New Mexico last week when the presidential debate happened on purpose. Because I didn’t want to watch it live. Because I still have a hangover from one four years ago. anyway, I’ve since watched it, and I have.

How should I put this? Received a river of requests, for an update. And what this means to my forecast for the election. Some of you have been really, really rude about it, and you guys can stuff it. But for everybody else, Joe Biden obviously did not have a good day. he appeared confused, a little lost.

It wasn’t clear that he knew exactly where he was. And a lot of his responses, especially in the early half of the, debate, were just almost nonsensical. The term for what is happening to Joe Biden is that his mind is diluting. He’s losing control of the contact between the context of his memories and his life and the reality about him.

And this makes him slow and confused. And for anyone who has been watching him for the last year, you’ll notice that this is not a new thing. This has been happened with greater rapidity.

it’s been happening in press conferences and the Oval Office and briefings. it’s it’s getting bad.

now, I’m sure there are a lot of us out there who have parents or grandparents who are diluting, and it’s painful and it’s awkward, and eventually you get forgot. And it’s there are good days and there are bad days, but that’s not what you need for a president, because as you get older and Joe Biden is already 81, the number of bad days eventually tends to overwhelm the number of good days.

And he is no longer fit for office. He shouldn’t be running for president. He shouldn’t be president. And a vote for him is a vote against national stability in the United States. Let’s talk about the other guy now in the debate. I’d argue that 75 to 80% of everything that came out of Donald Trump’s mouth was boldfaced lies.

Most of those lies have been proven wrong in court on multiple occasions. he did have a few new ones that he brought out. Most of those were from Vidic River. if you remember, back to the Republican primaries earlier this year. Romsami, he was clearly the candidate who was most detached from reality.

The term for what’s going on with Donald Trump is that his mind is demented. he’s very sure of where he is because he just made it up. he lives in a bubble of his own mental creation. And when you’re like that and somebody pokes into your bubble, you get very, very, very angry. this is something we’ve seen out of Donald Trump for some time, but it’s really accelerated since he lost the presidential reelection me, three years ago.And he definitely doubled and tripled down on that in the debate. We all know someone who’s going through this either themselves or caring for them. caring for somebody with dementia is awful because you get yelled at a lot and it’s difficult to reconcile, you know, a loved one’s broken view of the world with who they used to be.

There are good days and there are bad days. But I think we all agree that as you get older and Donald Trump is now 79, significantly older than Hillary Clinton was when he said that she was too old to run for president. As you get older, eventually the bad days outnumber the good days, and Donald Trump is no longer fit to be president.

And a vote for him is a vote against national stability in the United States. And these are our choices. And so in the next part, I’m going to tell you how this is going to go. But we’ll do that from a different vista.

So where does this take us? I see two paths forward. The first is the path I identified a year and a half ago now. And we will include a link to that original video, in this one and in the written supporting materials. all of the things that I pointed out at that point still remain true.

I will pull out one that is even more relevant now, and that’s independents. Now, when I say independents, I’m not talking about the roughly 30 to 40% of Americans who are not registered as a Republican or a Democrat. No, no, no. of that 30 to 40%, almost all of them, vote with one party or the other 90% of the time.

They’re not independents. I’m talking about the true vote splitters, the 10% in the middle that have decided every American election in modern history. they don’t like either candidate. I’m one of those independents. Makes me a little sick to my stomach myself. Biden may have gotten a decent start, but he’s clearly not there anymore. He may have an okay team, but that’s not enough.

you need the person at the top. Top to be capable and conscious and cognizant. That’s not Biden anymore. however, on the other side, we have Donald Trump, who, part of his dementia is that his insistence that he the election was stolen from him, despite the fact that members of his own administration who were in charge of election integrity, say that it was the cleanest election ever.

his particular dementia threatens independence because he’s telling people that the general election doesn’t matter and everything should be decided in primaries where he does well. And of course, he does well in primaries, because the MAGA crowd will do whatever he says and they will show up in force to the primaries even when he’s not campaigning for them.

His ability to sweep the primaries without lifting a finger this time around, that was actually really impressive. But if you’re an independent, it means that your vote goes away. so it’s a choice between someone who’s deluded or someone who’s

Dementia will destroy your ability to vote from the future. And, you know, that’s a no contest. also, never forget that there are more Democrats than Republicans.

So Joe Biden does not need to capture the independent vote to win if the independents just don’t show up because they’re disgusted with both, that’s a victory for Biden. And so my general assessment that this is Biden’s election, no matter what happens, as long as he remains alive, stands a little sick to my stomach. This is an ugly choice, but it’s not a particularly difficult one.

There is one other way that this could go. friends and families and colleagues of Joe Biden are now advising that he consider stepping down and let a more capable candidate, run, which I think would be a great idea. Now, there’ve been people on both sides, maintain the Democrats and old school Republicans, people who are Republicans.

Before Trump took over the party, who insist that if either side were able to float a better candidate, that they would just sweep because these two candidates are so broken and I understand where they’re coming from. The problem is the process of getting to that. the primaries are functionally over. and on the Democratic side, it’s very weird for you get to get a meaningful challenger, for the nomination.

when you have somebody who’s already in office and that this is no exception. the difference this time around is that Biden might willingly step down. And if he does that, we will have what’s called an open convention. But that is not a slam dunk. and for this, I blame Barack Obama. one of the reasons why I think Barack Obama will go down in history is one of the bottom 10% of presidents we’ve ever had.

One of the many reasons is he functionally destroyed the Democratic Party’s ability to generate talent. when he ran for president, he formed his own organization and ran in parallel. And then when he got enough momentum, he basically co-opted the Democratic Party institution for his own purposes, something similar to what, Donald Trump did. in doing so, he made it all about him.

And then for the next eight years, he sucked all the oxygen out of the room and prevented a new generation of political leaders from rising up within the party. And so that’s why we have folks like Schumer and Pelosi who are almost as old as Biden, who are the powerbrokers in Congress. And a new generation is really having a hard time getting going now.

they’ve started, but it’s probably too late, certainly too late for the cycle. And that means that the only people who are willing to run for president in the primary system are those ideological idiots like, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, who can draw national support and kind of like Trump with MAGA, get people to show up in numbers to the primaries, even if people would normally not consider themselves Democrats.

if you have an open convention, those ideological idiots will be there. But the advantage of an open convention is you might get normal politicians, God forbid, there. So I have always been a fan in the American political system of the governors, because they have to deal with day in, day out issues and actually make the trains run on time and they have to govern across the aisle.

And we haven’t had a meaningful governor run on the Democratic side for a bit. And on the Republican side, it’s just been overwhelmed, by Donald Trump

So for an open convention, we might actually because it’s just going to be for like a few weeks instead of this endless campaigning system that we seem to have normally, a governor could throw his or her hat in the ring, not have to deal with all the shit of all the ideological wars, and actually get a good candidate.

And that is a way that the Democrats could have a complete blowout of the system of the election. It is possible, but it’s also possible you could get Elizabeth Warren, who was like one of three people on this planet that Donald Trump could beat. This can’t happen on the Republican side. Donald Trump has destroyed the Republican Party. He’s purged of anyone who was against him.

And the real, breakpoint was back in March when he took over the Republican National Committee. And the first thing he did was purge anyone who had anything to do with polling or candidate selection or basically fact gathering. Anyone who had any experience in politics, and basically replaced them all with his flunkies. So Trump, even if he dies tomorrow, will probably still be the Republican nominee this round.

His grip on what’s left of the Republican Party is that firm.

Okay. That’s it for me today. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of delusion versus Dementia and its After Effects. as always, with all of my domestic political, videos, I invite you to send outraged messages to the collection email spot, which is [email protected] that’s [email protected]. And I promise I will put personally review and respond to each and every None of them. Until next time.

Joe Biden: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (source: Joe Biden); User:TDKR Chicago 101 (clipping)Donald Trump: Shealah Craighead (source: White House)Сombination: krassotkin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lessons on Elections and Faith from Unexpected Places

We’ve got a few more elections to talk about today, and who knows, maybe the US might even learn something from South Africa and India.

Over in India, Prime Minister Modi’s BJP party didn’t quite get the majority vote they expected, so that necessitates a coalition government. Many are even citing this as a good thing for India, as to limit Modi’s increasingly authoritarian rule. The crazy thing is that this election was clean, well-run, and everyone has accepted the results.

In South Africa, the party who has been ruling since the anti-apartheid era – the ANC – also fell short at the polls. So, they’ll also need to form a coalition, although the other parties rounding out the coalition aren’t exactly first round draft picks. Despite the ANC’s corruption, the election was still accepted as free and fair.

Here are my takeaways from today. #1 – India and South Africa will be forming coalition governments. #2 – the people of India and South Africa have more faith in their electoral processes than Americans do in theirs…yikes.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Birmingham, Alabama today. We’re in town about a couple of the major elections that have happened recently. I mean, we’ve already covered Mexico, but I want to do South Africa and India now, the conventional wisdom in most places is actually correct on this one. In India, the government of the BJP, which is Prime Minister Modi, suffered a significant setback, polling as recently as a week ago or a week before the elections indicated that they were on track to get a two thirds majority, which would have allowed the Modi government to amend the constitution without restriction.

and instead they came at it under 50%. And so they actually have to form a coalition government. So they’re still in charge. Modi still the prime minister, but it has been a significant hit to his prestige. and lots of people are talking about how this is a savior, Indians seizing control of their own democracy and preventing an autocracy from happening because Modi has become more and more authoritarian as he’s been prime minister.

All of that is correct. I would argue that Modi’s reputation for being an economic whiz has proven wrong, and he has mismanaged a lot of the government finances and a lot of economic policies, turning towards populism. And that was rejected to a certain degree. but rather than poopoo Modi or the BJP in general, I think it’s something that is far more important is what’s happening under the hood.

this is a country that has lots of issues and infrastructure and education and equality, but they just ran an election where a billion people voted and the government didn’t win in the way it had hoped. And it’s okay. the trust in the political system is high. The Indians may have their faults, but wow, do they know how to count votes?

They ran a clean election. The government has accepted it. Modi has accepted it. That’s something that we could probably learn a little bit from. the other country, of course, is South Africa. There you’ve got the ANC, which fought against the apartheid system back in the 70s and 80s. that has basically run the government ever since, usually with a supermajority.

And they too have now gotten the smallest share of their vote in a very long time, if not ever, and again below 50%. They also will have to form a coalition. Here are the problems a little bit more intractable, because there aren’t a lot of people to draw from. you’ve got a group called the Democratic Alliance that is basically, like a pro-business libertarian group that is primarily ethnically white.

You’ve got the Economic Freedom Fighters who would fight Latin American socialists to be two conservatives. And then you have a new group that has formed by the former, president of the country, Jacob Zuma, basically around his cult of personality. I mean, Zuma is arguably one of the most corrupt people in human history. who’s trying to make a comeback.

so whoever the ANC has to form a coalition with, it’s going to be awkward. but again, here, the ANC, which is known for corruption, has just run an election in which they lost and no one has an issue with it because it was free and fair. One of the things we forget about in the United States is we actually do run the most free, most fair elections in the world.

Don’t believe me? Believe a guy by the name of Chris Coons, who was Donald Trump appointed election integrity advisor, who said the day of the election four years ago that it was the cleanest election in American history. Now, Coons was, of course, fired within an hour for making that statement, but he hasn’t recounted. And of all of the challenges we have seen to the American electoral system in the last three years, of all the court cases, not one shred of evidence has yet to be produced indicating that anything had gone wrong.

The day of running elections isn’t hard. Believing in them. That’s a little bit more difficult.

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America After the Election: Foreign Policy

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

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Some more info on the Institute for Liberal Values

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