How to Break Iran

A ripped grungy back wall of the Iranian flag

If the U.S. wants to force a meaningful change in Iran’s government, there’s only one path forward. They have to destabilize the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The IRGC has become the center of power in Iran. While leadership is divided into three groups, the IRGC is the military-economic network that controls industry and enforces domestic control. Given Iran’s fragmentation and ethnic diversity, internal stability is essential. Should the IRGC’s revenue streams fall in the war, internal fractures would form.

If the younger members begin seeking power over the older elites who control the wealth, a civil conflict would erupt. Of course, it would be extremely destabilizing not only for Iran but also for the region.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Sorry. Fever broke last night, so I’m better, but I’m still kind of weak. Where was I? Most of our coverage of the Iran war at this point is about what’s been blowing up the energy side of things. Strait of Hormuz, all that good stuff. Today, I wanted to go a different direction and talk about what might, might, might change in Iran that would end the war the way the United States would be really excited about, what I’m going to say isn’t necessarily how it’s going to go, but if we are going to break the Iranian government, it’ll look like this. 

So the Iranian government basically has three big chunks that matter. First, you’ve got your supreme leader and surrounding the supreme leader are all of the people who are in charge of the guns and the overall strategy. So the intelligence minister, the defense minister, the people who are in charge of the IRGC, that is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a militia that controls most of the day to day operations and, the country and among these groups controls all of their overseas assets and their influences throughout the Middle East, whether that is militants in Syria, Hezbollah, Shia in Iraq or what have you. A lot of these people, at least at the top, have now been killed. The Supreme leader’s gone. The new Supreme leader was selected, but his parents is one of his kids, and his wife has been killed. 

The defense minister has been killed. And on and on and on. It’s not that this group is not functional, but it means that they’ve handed power down to the IRGC. More on them in a minute. The second group are the political and economic leadership that run the day to day operations of the country. The president, for example, the economics minister, the energy minister. 

For the most part, these people have not been targeted by the Americans and the Israelis because they’re not responsible for most of the policies that the Americans and the Israelis find problematic. So when you see Iran going up and mucking up the region, these aren’t the people responsible. These are the people, for the most part, stay at home. 

And they’ve been mostly left alone. But then you’ve got the IRGC, and that’s very different. A couple things to keep in mind. Number one, Iran is not a normal country. It’s all mountainous. And in each mountain valley you have a different ethnicity. And so how the Persians came to control this territory is they expanded out of their original mountain home in Persepolis and then went to the next valley over and conquered and intermingled with those people, and then to a third and a fourth and a fifth, and eventually did that a thousand times. 

So when people talk about the thousand nations of Persia, they’re not exaggerating. This is a multi-ethnic society that has been trying to slowly grind its minorities into amalgamation for several thousand years, and today they’re only about half completed. Only 51% of Iranians identify as Persians. Now all the others still identify as Iranian. I’m not suggesting that there’s like a really robust opportunity here for multiple fifth columns, but it does shape the decision making, and it’s pretty clear that it’s the Persians who are in control of all the major decisions, especially the IRGC, the IRGC, plus the military. 

Its primary job is to make sure that 49% of the population who are not Persian never get persnickety and rise up. So in many cases, the Iranian military force is primarily designed to occupy its own country. 

All right. That’s the background you need for us to get into the real stuff. Now let’s talk about what can happen. The clerical class that is part of those first two categories, the supreme leader chunk and the more technocratic chunk. 

That’s 10,000 people. And so if you wanted to destroy the political system of a country, that’s a lot of folks that you have to drop bombs on. And undoubtedly we’ve managed to do so for, for at least a couple hundred that were at the top. But there are always going to be more people waiting in the wings to step up and get into the big chair, even during a war. 

So grinding through that entire class, which was basically would be a religious war, going after all the priests, is something that just really isn’t viable unless you’re going to put 1 million or 2 million troops on the ground in Iran to go through a country that’s twice the size of Texas with three times the population and root out each individual one, not really viable. 

And then there’s the IRGC links to the clerical class, but more generally not of the clerical class. These are people about a quarter of a million to a half a million strong, based on whose numbers you’re using, who are also responsible for domestic pacification. 

So whenever there is an uprising the IRGC comes in and starts shooting people. They also have very good relations with, say, the Syrians and especially the Russians. And so the Russians provide them with technology to track down people who are using cell phones or Starlink and basically get them in their homes and then remove them from the equation. Not nice people, but where there might might be a weakness in the IRGC model, it’s not in the guns. 

Then the money. IRGC is self-funding. They control broad swaths of the Iranian economy from energy projects that they have forced private sector players out to the electricity system, which they control half of, to any sort of smuggled good. And since Iran is one of the most sanctioned countries in history, pretty much anything that is imported is smuggled at some level. 

And that means that they have a vast array of income streams that add up to the tens of billions of dollars every year, and that money train is what entices people to join the IRGC. So today, we’re in a position where the senior political leadership around the supreme leader has been neutered or is at least in hiding. And the IRGC, in many ways, is the face of the regime now, because power devolve down to them, because they control a lot of military assets, including the missile program, the nuclear program, the shadow program. 

And so when they see their interests get hit, waves of shitheads come out. So if you remember last week, Israel bombed part of a facility called the South Pars natural gas field, which is where the country gets the 70% of their natural gas. That natural gas is used to make power that hit the IRGC directly. 

So they sent out 50 different attacks into various places across the entire region, and in doing so, made it very clear that they were perfectly willing to burn down all the energy infrastructure in the region if their economic interests are hurt. But if you really do want to change the government, you have to break the IRGC. Now, since there’s over a quarter of a million of them, there’s no way, even with a ground invasion, that you’re going to go in there and root them all out. 

So you have to change the economic math here. It’s a generational issue. Ever since the Shah fell back in 79, there has been a baby bust and a consolidation of power among the people who were alive before that. And so we’ve seen the leadership of Iran, as a rule, get over and over and over. 

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t young people there just fewer young people than there are old people. And how the demographic issue is playing out with the IRGC is you have a lot of people in their 20s and 30s and maybe even into their 40s that have never really tasted power, and they see their elders absorbing most of the profits from the smuggling and the energy in the electricity sector and construction and everything else. And they’re beginning to wonder with the war, when is my time? 

Well, if the IRGC economic aspects get crushed in the war, then you might be able to generate this sort of uprising from within the Corps itself with the younger folks, the Young Turks, if you will, going against the older folks at the moment. That is the only path forward that I see where the United States might actually be able to change the regime in the country, forcing basically a civil war in the IRGC itself. 

It would not be easy. And every time you go after the IRGC economic assets, you know, they’re going to hit the economic assets of the broader Gulf. But at this point, we have at least another 4 or 5 weeks of the war before the batch of Marines that are coming in from California arrive. And in that time, we’re probably going to lose most of that anyway. 

So we’re already talking about the Persian Gulf being removed from the mechanics of global economics permanently. The question is whether or not you want to also try as part of that process to remove the IRGC. It’s an ugly way to do it, but at the moment, it’s the only real weakness in the way that Iran is set up that I think might be able to be exploited.

The Shield of the Americas

Silhouetted soldier against a black background

Trump has launched a new regional security initiative called the Shield of the Americas. This partners with several Latin American leaders that Trump likes to target drug cartels throughout LATAM.

The U.S. would utilize special forces and intelligence teams to carry this out. While they could target cartel leaders, labs, and trafficking nodes, as long as there is demand in the North, the drug trade will persist.

Eliminating the industry would require massive troop commitments, resulting in significant political consequences. And even then, the drugs would find a way to keep flowing.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about what went down to the white House over the weekend. 

Specifically, there’s this new grouping called shield of the Americas that Donald Trump has initiated between the United States and a number of Latin American countries that he considers ideological allies. So, by the way, that the Latin Americans use the term further to the right, so not including Colombia or Brazil, but concluding places like El Salvador or Trinidad and Tobago or Argentina. 

Keep in mind that what means left and right in Latin America is a little bit different from what it means here in the United States, but the Trump administration has not picked up on that. Bygones. Second that to all of these governments, just like any other democracy, switch back and forth. So this is an alliance, an alignment of the moment. 

And first thing, you should not count on the current roster of countries being what is there tomorrow or the next day, or much less the day after. There are always elections going on. We won Columbia this summer. That is probably going to be quite significant. 

And so the roster moves. But what is more important about the Shield of Americas, is not so much the Secretariat or any idea of policy. There’s no talk of trade deals. It’s all all about security cooperation. And the idea is that the Trump administration has decided it wants to take the U.S. military, push it into Latin America specifically to go after drug smuggling organizations. Now, back story. Historically speaking, the United States involvement in Latin America has been somewhat limited unless there is a third party from out of hemisphere operating the whole concept of the Monroe Doctrine is it’s not so much that this is our hemisphere, but it’s certainly not your hemisphere. 

So whether it was the Germans or the Soviets or the Chinese or whatever, there’s always been a degree of built in American hostility to anyone on the outside pushing in here. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the United States is dominant economically, although there are periods in the history where that has happened. Second, with the United States is in the process, independent of Trump, exemplified by Trump of contracting its footprint and its interests in the Eastern Hemisphere. 

Now we can have a conversation of whether that’s smart or not, but politically, it’s very popular on both sides of the aisle to bring the boys home and to be less involved in trade on a global basis. I would argue that’s mostly self-defeating, and guarantees will get drawn into something bigger later. But, you know, I’m only one guy. 

If 330 million of us, my vote isn’t all that big. What it does mean, however, is that if you take the United States military and all of a sudden it’s not obsessed with the Eastern Hemisphere, and a lot of the forces come home, and of course, it’s going to be used more aggressively in the Western Hemisphere. And since there’s no country in the Western Hemisphere that’s even remotely capable of fielding a force that is of any conventional threat to the United States, then the question is, what are you going to use the tools for? 

They may have been designed for Islamic fundamentalism or the Chinese army or whatever it happened to be, but if they’re here, they’re going to be applied to different threats. And the threat of international drug trafficking organizations is obviously a significant one that everyone agrees is a problem. We just all agree on what to do with it. I would argue that the simple way to destroy all of these organizations overnight is just just not do cocaine. 

But again, I’m only one vote of 330 million. So we now have the Trump administration and at least 14 other governments, at least on the surface, agreeing to deploy American forces throughout the hemisphere to combat these cartels. Now, two things. Number one, as I said originally, the roster is going to change. And so you’re going to see a lot of small bases and coordination facilities popping up and then going away after an election and then popping up again after the next election. 

And that means we’re not talking about a regular army, and probably not even the Marines, because the type of permanent footprint that’s necessary for those two institutions is in the billions of dollars of investment. And you can’t just come and go and come and go and expect it to be useful at all. It takes months to deploy the Army in a meaningful way. 

Marines a little bit faster, but not by a lot. This is not a job for the Navy and aircraft carriers. This is much more specific. Once you limit what you can do with bases, and that means facilities that are small. And then if they get folded up tomorrow, it’s no big deal. Which means that the entire American deployment for this sort of thing is going to be special forces, whether it is the Green Berets or the Rangers or the Seals or the CIA. 

Now that community, the Special Forces community, has more than doubled the number of operators they’ve had as an outcome of the war on terror, because you never knew where you needed to drop in a small team of a dozen people. Now that the war on terror is over, I don’t want to say that the Special Forces Command has nothing to do, but they’ve gone from having a long grading war where they’ve been working in tandem with over 100,000 Americans deployed in combat situations, throughout the Middle East to all of a sudden that’s gone. 

And so they have become the premier force for the American president, whoever that happens to be, to address whatever issue happens to be coming up in the world or to a degree, deniable, they’re small, they’re agile, they’re lethal, they’re very skilled. They have a long logistical tail. But that means that at the point of the spear is a lot of force behind it. 

So when you look at things like Latin America, you think of drug cartels. This is really the perfect tool for the job, independent of the fact that it’s twice as big as it used to be. It depends on the fact that they’re actually very good at what they do. The only problem, and it’s not a really big one from my point of view, is that they’ve been training for something else for 25 years now. 

There’s not a lot of desert territory in Latin America where there’s drug trafficking. You’re talking primarily mountains. You’re talking primarily jungle or jungle mountains. That means we’re probably going to be seeing the teams deployed throughout the length and the breadth of the region. The question and only Donald Trump can answer this question right now is whether or not you’re going to deploy them exclusively in places where you have a degree of political cover and agreement with the host country. 

In a place like El Salvador, pretty easy. El Salvador is not a major drug trafficking location in places like Colombia, where the government is currently kind of hostile. That’s a different question. As a rule, when Latin American countries realize they have a cartel problem, they’re usually pretty enthusiastic about working with the United States on security matters. But it’s always been a step of remove. 

So, for example, if you look at Plan Colombia, which was the deal we cut with the Colombians in the early 2000, we shipped a lot of equipment, we provided a lot of Intel work. We provided some naval support, but it was always Colombian boots on the ground doing the actual grunt work. And in doing so, it ended their Civil War and led to a collapse in cocaine production. 

You’re not going to do that with ten special forces teams. You can go after specific nodes. You can go after specific production sites, you can go after specific people. But we’re talking about an industry here. The drug industry gets tens of billions of dollars. And as long as there’s demand north of the border in the United States for these products, special forces are not going to be able to change the math to a huge degree. 

That’s the second problem. The third problem is really much bigger. And that’s Mexico, in Mexico, with the current government in Colombia. Shame bomb. We have a government that is much more willing to work with the United States, even in the United States, as being a bully. But you’re talking about where the cartels, the big ones, originated. 

And while they are in the process of fracturing because their leaderships have been removed, all of the economics that are still pushing the cocaine north are still there. And so you’re talking about having to do something like not special forces, but actually deploying tens of thousands of troops in order to impose a security reality. Here’s the thing. We’ve tried that if you go back to the Afghan war, at its height, we had 90,000 troops there. 

And while they were trying to hold the country together to fight the war on terror, heroin production increased. Because you can only be so many places once Mexico is over twice the size of Afghanistan, Mexico has over twice the population of Afghanistan. And so even if we were to put a couple hundred thousand troops in Mexico, I really doubt it would be enough to change the overall economics of drugs. 

Anyway, bottom line of all of this is, while the United States can’t solve these problems, as long as there is an insatiable source of narcotics demand, it does have some tools that allow it to interfere in the region in a really deep piercing, meaningful way. The question is whether or not the political and economic side effects of that are worth the perceived benefits. 

Mild disruption of cocaine production, transiting versus breaking the political relationship that allows, say, the trade relationship to happen. Because Mexico is by far our largest trading partner and will be for the remainder of my life, and without them in the American trading network, everything we need to do gets a lot more difficult.

The End of U.S. Military Deployments?

A group of Marines loading into the back of a C-130 aircraft

Just because the US intervened in Venezuela doesn’t mean that America will be abandoning its global military posture.

The US maintains military deployments in Japan, Germany, and South Korea. Don’t think of this as imperial overreach; think of it as a low-cost force multiplier that prevents bloodier conflicts down the road. Should the US withdraw from these positions, things would likely get ugly…and quick.

The US is the only country with the ability to project power globally, and these optimally-sized deployments help extend that reach.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, avoiding the crazy winds out there. Through with you inside. We’re taking questions from the Patreon crowd about the Venezuelan intervention and the rest of Nicolas Maduro, the former current. I’m not sure how that works out now. Venezuelan president. Anyway, he’s going to go in jail. We’ll never hear from him again. 

The question is, is, is this a prelude to a general disengagement from the Eastern Hemisphere and closing down all the bases we have there? He’s like, oh, let’s let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first. The United States currently has fewer troops stationed abroad than at any time since the since World War two. We had a surge with the war on terror. 

We’re back down to a pre, like the lows that we had in the early 2000. And it’s important to understand that the United States footprint globally is actually quite limited. Right now we have about, let’s called 100,000 troops abroad. Most of those are concentrated in three areas. You’ve got the largest contingent, which is in Japan. The second largest. which is in Germany and the third largest, which is in Korea, especially closer to the DMZ. All of these serve as force multipliers for the United States. Everything else is a very small contingent, maybe a naval base here and there that has a few hundred to a couple thousand people that are basically there to help the carriers operate. 

But the way World War Two ended, we already have places like midway, for example, which is U.S. territory or access to the United Kingdom, which has their own naval bases that we just kind of rent. And so the, the need for the United States to maintain a far flung Imperial style military deployment just doesn’t exist. If you see the United States back away from the deployments we do have, it means that we have made a very clear strategic decision as a country to foment a war and so that we can participate in the next one. 

And lose a few tens to hundreds, thousands of troops. So, for example, if we walk away from Japan, Japan is the anchor. And because of the way that the islands in the Pacific are position, it means that we basically give up the ability to influence the Asian mainland and the western third of the Pacific, which includes Japan and Korea and Taiwan and China and Singapore and Indonesia and Australia. 

And if we decide to walk away from that, we’re basically saying that this whole area can evolve on its own, maybe generate a new hegemon, that we will then have to come back and deal with decades from now, basically setting up something similar to the rise of Japan in World War two. If we walk away from Germany. 

Oh my God. Oh, God. Okay, so every time the Germans are responsible for making their own decisions, they start acting like a country or something. And as a large country, the largest of the European states by population, economy set in the middle of the continent, it will naturally try to influence the areas around it. And that is exactly what set everybody on the course to World War One and World War Two. 

And so to do that deliberately, to set up a repeat of the world wars in Europe, strikes me as something that would not be in American interest. And that’s before you consider the fact that the Russians have been pointing nukes at US my entire life, and I’m now 50, 52 birthday coming up. That strikes me as immensely unwise. 

One for the low, low cost of 30,000 troops stationed in bases that are nowhere near a front line. You can basically control the strategic destiny of a continent that’s cheap. Third, Korea, you draw those troops back. Forget about the likelihood of a war in the peninsula, which is would be very likely at that point. North Korea has nukes pointing at us, with the range to reach us. 

So your permanently now putting Minneapolis, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles under a nuclear threat and defending against that would require an order of magnitude more cost, than simply maintaining 20 to 25,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula. So really, the three big deployments we have right now are there for very good reasons, mostly in terms of controlling the strategic environment, and because not having them there would require us to take a defensive position in our hemisphere, which would be extraordinarily more expensive and set up the situation for war down the road. 

Okay, so that’s the United States. Now let’s talk about everybody else’s deployments. 

Okay. That’s all of them. Here’s the thing that most people forget. Deploying troops in the thousands, much less tens of thousands a continent away, is very difficult, requires specialized logistics and decades of practice and infrastructure development. And so we are the only ones in the modern era that does that. The last time any countries did it at scale, it was before World War Two when we had the Japanese Empire, which we, to be perfectly honest, modeled some of our stuff, and the British Empire, which of course we modeled some of our stuff off besides that in the modern era, and nobody does it now. 

Part of this is policy. The whole idea of the Cold War globalized system was that we will pay to create a world that keeps you safe is an exchange. You allow us to write your security policies. And that has been the basis of the American alliance going back to 1946. But the other part is just the sheer expense. 

By creating a globalized system, we gave everyone access to the globe and all the economic goodies that come from that. And trade and access to commodities and markets the world over. And they didn’t have to have the military for it. So most of them never even bothered to try. And so the world’s second and third largest navies are the Japanese and the Brits, both of which work hand in glove with the United States. 

And if we decided to withdraw from the Eastern Hemisphere, those two countries, as well as a number of others, would have no choice but to develop that capacity. Now, they wouldn’t do it in two years or five years. This is a generational thing, but eventually we’d have a half a dozen navies that had regional, maybe even global reach, and it would look a lot like 1929. 

I would argue that’s something that we don’t want to do, because doing it the first time was really expensive in men and lives in the United States honestly got off cheap because it was most of the fighting was over there rather than over here. Okay, let’s talk about the the big countries, more specifically China. People keep pointing to the fact that they’ve got a large Navy unit, and they do and they do have about, 50 ships that are capable of operating more than 600km from the shore. 

But even if you ignore the first island chain, which really hems them in, that doesn’t give them very much, because the Chinese don’t have basing rights in places that are useful to them. So when you look at the United States, we’ve got Japan’s second most powerful naval power on the world. Where we stage ships, we have midway, we have places that are allied in the North Atlantic basin, whether it happens to be Italy or Spain or the United Kingdom or Iceland. 

We have global power projection, in part because of our territories and in part because of our allies. The Chinese have no allies, so they’ve gone out trying to build what they call a string of pearls model, where they develop friendly ports along the route that they want. And so they get along okay with Malaysia. They basically bought Cambodia. 

And even though it has a coastline, they’re trying to build port there. They’ve got some friendly relations with Bangladesh and Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. And so the idea is they can use their short haul ships to hop from base to base to get all the way to the Persian Gulf, where they, where the oil is. 

And of course, everybody, because of pirate reasons, has a small base in Djibouti. But here’s the thing. If one of those gets broken in a hot war, every ship west of that is lost. The Chinese have tried to do it on the cheap, and that means it’s really easy to unravel. And so even if the United States were to find its vessels, say, stuck in the Indian Ocean, they have enough range to get out. 

The Chinese don’t. And so I’ve never really been worried about the Chinese naval build out. Let’s talk about the Russians. The Russians aren’t a naval power. They’re not an air power. They’re losing their space capability. Within a decade. Pretty much everything that they have that’s not ground base is going to be gone. They just lost the manufacturing base to maintain it, much less expand it. 

But they still have a large army, over a million men under arms. And every month, they’re bringing them another 20 to 40,000 men into the fight. That’s awful. If you’re on Russia’s border. And that’s the situation that the Ukrainians are struggling with right now. But if you’re not on Russia’s border, it’s actually not all that bad because you have standoff distance where you can use drones and air power. 

If you’re another country back, you know, you really don’t have to worry about the tanks coming either. By the way, the Russians have almost run out of tanks, which is crazy. They started this war with 20,000 armored vehicles. They’re down to probably less than a quarter of that now anyway. Bottom line is that their their exposure is huge, but their ability to push back that exposure is very, very limited. 

And their ability to use naval forces to protect power is basically zero. Now, they still have a handful of ships, but they’re split into four different bodies of water the Black Sea, where they can’t get past Istanbul unless the Turks allow them, and everything that does get passes. Relations with the Turks go south. That’s lost. They’ve got the Baltic Sea, but that is now completely a NATO lake. 

At this point they’ve got the Arctic Sea, which is their their most powerful fleet is up there. But the problem is it’s a long way from anywhere. And they have to get by Norway and Iceland and Scotland and the United Kingdom, the United States, all of which are superior naval powers on that, but one that Iceland doesn’t have a military. 

But everybody else could probably do it by themselves at this point, even without the United States. And then they have the Pacific Fleet that is based off of, Petrobras, which is basically a city you can only fly to on the peninsula. And of course, the Japanese are there. They could potentially be some things in the code Vladivostok, but that is literally surrounded by Japan, world’s second most powerful navy. 

And even if all of the Russian ships were in the same place, the Japanese could still easily take them out because they’ve done that before. So the ability of the United States to project power is huge, in part because of its geography, but also because of its allies. The Chinese are blocked in by geography, the Russians are blocked in by geography, and neither of them have allies. 

So we’re in this weird situation where the United States is considering a full scale withdrawal from everything, which will guarantee higher defense costs and longer, long term security challenges. This is one of the things that the people who are really pro isolation tend to miss the the footprint that we have right now is almost perfectly optimized to not have to spend money or lives. 

As an added benefit, you also get to control the security architecture a huge part of the planet. You pull back all that goes away.

US Foreign Policy After Trump

Flags of multiple countries blowing in the wind

Trying to figure out what foreign policy will look like after Trump is a fool’s errand. With no strategic consensus or institutional planning capacity, the US is stuck in a car without brakes, a driver, or a steering wheel.

The US is undergoing a historic demographic transition, but the political realm hasn’t adjusted to this new reality. The bipartisan foreign policy framework that’s been in place since the 40s has collapsed. Trump has dismantled the Republican Party. Democrats lack coherent leadership. Key planning institutions have been gutted. Yikes.

The US is entering a volatile period where foreign policy is driven by instinct or ideology rather than strategy.

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Transcript

Hey all Peter Zeihan here coming from Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon page. And it’s specifically, And I quote, foreign policy under the Trump administration is little, what’s going to happen after Trump? I would love to have a clear answer for you, but I don’t, A couple things to keep in mind. Number one, the United States economy is going through a transition as the baby boomers leave and the Zoomers come in. We’re losing our largest workforce ever, and it’s been replaced with our smallest workforce generation ever. 

That’s going to change the complexion of the economy. That’s going to change what we need to do in foreign policy. From an economic point of view, that is very much in flux. This has never happened in American history before. We are making it up as we go along. Tariffs are part of that. Trade deals are part of that. 

And we haven’t had time yet for politics to rearrange around this fact because we’re still in the opening years of the transition. So that’s problem one for why we really don’t know. Problem two is it the bipartisan nature of foreign policy is gone now, from 1945 until very recently, until probably the Obama administration, maybe even through Trump one and Biden. 

But certainly within the last 15 years, it’s broken. We’ve had bipartisan foreign policy because we had an agreement on what we needed to do. The Soviet Union were the bad guys. We needed the alliance in order to contain them. So the United States used its military to basically buy up an alliance. We would protect you. 

We would allow you to sell your products into our market if in exchange, we could control your security policies in order to box in the Soviet Union. Soviet Union’s been gone for 35 years. We never had a conversation on what should replace that policy. And eventually we knew it was going to fall apart. And under Trump, too, it has fallen apart good and hard. 

But we don’t have a replacement system. Trump might think he has a foreign policy for the ages, but he doesn’t have a successor. And the Republican Party has been shorn of its policy arm. Trump destroyed it and basically made the party a just a campaign function with no talent recruitment, no talent gestation, no policy development. And the Democrats are useless, for so many reasons. 

Anyway, bottom line is, when we go into the next presidential cycle, there’s no successor for Trump and the Democrats really don’t have any rising people. And even if you had a personality on both sides who Is liekly to take over things, there really isn’t an institution in either party that is capable of coming up with ideas for what should be next. 

Nor is there in government, the Trump administration has gutted a lot of branches of the US governing system that help with planning. Just to pick two, there’s an office that basically hunts down epidemics on a global level, but it’s based on science. So one of the first things that DHS chief, Robert Kennedy Jr did was gut it so it could never tell him that he was making shit up. 

And in the US military, we had something called the Office of Net Assessment, whose sole job was to look over the horizon and game out what the next conflicts were supposed to look like, but they made Pete Hegseth look like he wasn’t a very bright boy. And so that office was gutted as well. Things like this had happened in commerce and Treasury and all the rest. 

And so the things that the US government used to do to help the presidency prepare for whatever is next, they’re all gone. So we’re kind of flying blind when it comes to thinking about what the challenges and the opportunities of the future are going to be. And because the parties have not been able to step into that gap for various reasons, we have an inability as a country now to prepare. 

And so any policies that we are going to have for the next decade probably are going to be solely based on gut feelings like Donald Trump or blind ideology that is completely uninformed by modern affairs. That is going to get us involved in a lot more conflicts that are going to be a lot bloodier than they need to be, because we’re not doing anything to prepare for any of them. 

We have been here before, in the world before the World wars in particular. Certainly before World War two, the United States didn’t have a dedicated foreign policy arm in the way that we thought about it during the Cold War. And so we basically had a complete overhaul of what our foreign policy used to be, almost every administration. 

We are now going back to that sort of situation. But in a world that is far more interconnected than anything we had in the 19th century. So, yeah, it’s going to be a really rough, really rocky ride until such time as our political system regenerates and we get some decent leadership who can actually think forward. I would love to think that’s going to happen for the next presidential election. 

I have absolutely no confidence it will, because Donald Trump has a vested interest in making sure the Republicans don’t turn the page. And the Democrats are so chaotic right now, it’s really difficult to see them coming together. We will probably have to wait for a third force, somebody either rising up within the parties or forming a new one to basically take the reins and start us over with a new structure. 

Historically speaking, we have done that many times. But it isn’t always an awkward process to live through, and it usually takes about a decade. So for now, the next few years, this is where we are.

Who Needs National Security Guidance Anyways

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

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

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

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Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crippling the Kremlin with Russian Sanctions

landscape of the kremlin in Moscow, Russia

The Trump administration’s sanctions on Russia’s energy sector are proving to be more substantive than the other policies we’ve seen.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about the sanctions that the Trump administration has put on the Russian energy sector, most notably on Rosneft, which is a state oil monopoly near monopoly, and Lukoil, which is the largest technically private company, but is really indirectly run by the state as well. A couple weeks back, the Trump administration put punitive tariffs on the two companies, saying that, no one can deal with them at all. 

And, if they do, they can’t deal with the United States or access the US dollar. And since all, crude traded internationally, well, well over 99.9% of it is exchanged in the US dollar. That basically means being shut off from global finance, among other things. We’ve had a few developments. First, a minor one with Hungary, Hungary’s president, Viktor Orban, who is, well, it’s kind of a weird cat anyway. 

He is an anti European anti-American pro Russian stooge, is the very short and to be perfectly honest, not particularly biased view. He’s been, working to sabotage sanctions on all things Russia and embargoes on all things Russian ever since the Ukraine war started, and has actually said that, if the Russian troops were in Kiev, they’d probably be better for Hungary because Hungary wants a piece of Ukraine as well. 

Anyway, he was in the white House and managed to, Sweet talk his way into getting an exemption from the sanctions. Hungary has been basically using and gorging upon Russian crude for the entirety of the Ukraine war and has been trading, exemptions to European sanctions and tariffs and such, in order to maintain access in exchange for letting the Europeans do what they want more broadly with the Ukraine question. 

And he was able to repeat that feat with Donald Trump this past week. I wouldn’t count on that lasting because no country that borders Hungary has a similar exception. So now that the sanctions are in place, there won’t be Russian oil or natural gas flowing through Ukraine to Hungary and even things like nuclear fuel are gonna have to be flown direct, but they’re going to have to be flown around the war zone that is Ukraine. 

And if you have radioactive material in your plane that trigger some other issues anyway. So, the Ukrainians are saying it’s a permanent exemption, that the Trump administration is saying it’s a 12 month exemption. The, the disconnect between the two is pretty typical for Trump’s deals on anything, and how the Hungarians are going to be squeezed out of this. 

It’s not a real problem. There is no alternate infrastructures that comes in through Slovakia or especially through Croatia. So they’re going to be fine. So it’s temporary issue. The broader issue is that Lukoil is actually an international company, whereas Rosneft’s holdings are all domestic. And for Lukoil, who holds assets in the United States, a lot of fuel stations. Or oil fields in Iraq. You’re actually talking about a substantial amount of production and financially viable assets that they’re going to have to now dump. Now, they were planning on selling them to a trading company based in Switzerland called governor. Now, governor was this is kind of funny. It’s a shell game. 

Back in 2014, the first time the Russians invaded Ukraine, governor was set up by a Russian who was affiliated with Lukoil. And then he immediately sold all of his shares to his Swedish partner because he knew he was going to be sanctioned. And it’s been operating as an independent, independent trading, platform ever since. The whole time it’s basically been a front for the Kremlin. 

And so the feeling was that governor was just going to buy all the assets. The Trump administration still hasn’t staffed up. Almost a year into its administration. And if you want to actually have a sanctions regime that is meaningful, you have to have a staff on it full time to deal with all the loopholes that will pop up. 

That’s been a big one. Well, the Treasury Department under Treasury Secretary percent, figure that all do all by themselves or with some help. I don’t really care how. And have already said that they oppose the sale to governor. So the assets are going to have to be split up on a national basis and sold more viably to get away from Russian influence, which is, you know, great. 

This is the first time in any sort of economic policy out of this administration that there seems to have been any awareness of some of the political and economic realities at the ground level. Normally we get a big broad tariff policy and then countries figure out how to get around it. The Chinese certainly have done that over and over and over again. 

But at least on this one point, the Russians have not. And that is absolutely worth noting. And giving credit where credit is due. Let’s see. There was one more. Oh, yeah. Rosneft has is a state monopoly. It’s technically incompetent. It really has very few petroleum engineers, and it’s gotten to where it is as being the biggest company in Russia by absorbing the assets of other people who have, from time to time fallen a foul of the Kremlin. 

Maybe that’s Yukos, which was run by a one time Russian oligarch. Maybe that’s T and CPP, which was a partnership that was part owned by British Petroleum. They just call themselves BP now. Anyway, it’s expansion through government thuggery rather than the traditional methods. Well, that that’s now reached its peak because there are a number of projects that Rosneft is involved in and is technically the operator that it can’t operate. 

It can only run the projects with foreign partners who are doing most of the technical lifting. And the biggest and most important of those is something called Sakhalin. Now that’s an island off in the Russian Far East, just north of Japan, that produces some of the world’s most difficult to produce crude oil in league with a company called Exxon, and which produces liquefied natural gas with a couple of Japanese companies, Mitsu and Mitsubishi. 

Well, now that the sanctions are in place, the Russians are going to have to run Sakhalin themselves, and they don’t know how to do offshore, and they don’t know how to do liquefied natural gas. And they certainly can’t operate in the Sakhalin environment. So here we’ve got a project that is the single largest dollar item of foreign investment into Russia ever. 

That’s probably going to shut down over the next few months because the Russians can’t operate it themselves. Unless, of course, there’s something that weird goes on where Exxon, for example, gets an exemption to the sanctions, which I don’t find likely. Anyway, that’s the money. Russia, most of which is pretty good for Ukraine and honestly, broadly positive for the United States as well. 

So, you know, mazel tov.

Venezuela and the War Powers Act

Photo of a US Naval Carrier

The Trump administration’s campaign against alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling is raising some eyebrows. Let’s unpack the War Powers Act and how it applies to this.

The goal of this piece of legislation was to limit unilateral action; it requires presidents to brief Congress within 48 hours of deploying and withdraw them within 60 days unless an extension was approved. But with every president calling this Act unconstitutional since it was put in place (and the fact that Congress hasn’t had the gumption to challenge a president since it was established), this move will most likely go unchecked.

So, Trump has free rein unless Congress decides to step up after 50+ years of silence. Meaning the current operation involving warships, bombers, and 10,000+ US personnel targeting Venezuelan ships will continue with limited transparency.

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Transcript

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re gonna talk about what is going on in the southern Caribbean, specifically the Trump administration’s, targeting of alleged drug smuggling vessels coming out of Venezuela. A lot of people have written them asking me for a comment on the legality of this. And the best I can give you is that this is a gray area, no matter really how you look at it. 

According to the Constitution, the US president has the authority over the armed forces, and that is largely without restriction, unless in case of war, in which case Congress by a two thirds majority, needs to declare war. But Congress hasn’t declared a war since World War two, leaving all military policy basically in the hands of the president unless and until Congress says otherwise. 

Now, in 1973, Congress did say otherwise, and they passed something called the War Powers Act that says within 48 hours of any commitment of American forces into a combat situation, the president has to brief Congress on the details and then withdraw all forces within 60 days unless the president applies and is approved, for an extension. Anything beyond that requires the two thirds majorities by Congress to actually declare a military conflict. 

Now, since then, every single president, including Trump, won and Trump, too, has said that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional. But the War Powers Act was passed by a veto proof majority over the objections of the president at the time. And so you have this conflict between the executive branch and the legislative branch, and it really means that the president still can do whatever he wants so long as Congress does not act. 

And since 1973, we have not had a situation where two thirds of the Congress has been willing to oppose the president on military affairs. And that is where we remain today. So that leaves the president the ability to do whatever he wants. Now, under Trump administration, notification of Congress is something that has become very weak under the best of circumstances, and military affairs are no difference. 

There have been times in the past where the Trump administration has done something militarily and said that when it hit the news that was notification of Congress, which I don’t think any court back up. But again, Congress has not gotten together and had two thirds of its members say otherwise, which is what would be necessary in the current situation. 

Members of the House Military Affairs Committees and the intelligence committees had basically been furious with the Trump administration, not just the Democrats, especially the Republicans, because the Trump people who have come in to brief them have basically provided no information and no proof that any of these, ships were carrying drugs. Does that mean, I think that the Trump administration is just blowing up random ships? 

No, because there’s there’s quite an operation going on down there. Now. We have over 10,000 American service people that are involved in this operation. And at any given time, at least eight warships. We also are flying bombers, off the coast of Venezuela. So something is afoot. And the Trump administration is not sharing very many details with anyone, especially with Congress. 

And that leaves all of us kind of grasping at straws. All I can tell you for certain is that unless and until Congress starts acting like Congress, the Trump administration has full leave to do whatever it wants legally, where that takes us. I don’t have enough information to say right now.

So, You Want to Invade Venezuela…

Map of a bay of Venezuela

US military intervention in Venezuela keeps getting floated around, but I’m not sure people fully comprehend how UGLY this would be.

Venezuela is a mess. They have a corrupt leader, who has caused irreparable harm to the nation…but getting rid of him is the easy part. Caracas is the Everest of this endeavor, and it all comes down to geography. Sure, Caracas looks coastal, but it sits on a plateau behind 2 miles of tunnels and steep mountains. Translation: it’s not easy to get to.

We are talking about the US military though, so capturing Caracas wouldn’t be difficult. Holding and sustaining the population afterward is the scary part. We’re talking a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar project, with a population that depends upon imports that travel on fragile transit infrastructure. Think of this is a South American Chechnya.

Before I say this next line, allow me to emphasize that this as a VERY bad idea. But if someone was really gung on invading Venezuela, the western port city of Maracaibo is where I would start.

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Transcript

Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about Venezuela because relations between the Americans and the Venezuelans are getting pretty nasty, and people are starting to discuss, I wouldn’t say plan, but discuss whether or not there’s going to be a military intervention. At the moment, I don’t have any guidance on that. The Maduro government of Venezuela is obviously horrendously corrupt and obviously is involved in drug trafficking, if not to the degree that the Trump administration asserts. 

Most of the drugs still come from Colombia up through Central America and Mexico and the United States doesn’t mean that there’s not an important vector coming out of Venezuela, but it’s nowhere near the primary one. But the Maduro government is absolutely involved with the smuggling. So, you know, everybody gets a piece for the right, everybody gets a piece where they’re wrong. 

Let’s talk about what a military intervention would look like. The population of Venezuela, most notably the capital, Caracas, is only a few miles from the coast, which makes it sound like it’s ripe for a maritime intervention or an amphibious landing. But you would be wrong, because there’s a very strong coastal uplift with mountains basically paralleling the coast in that entire section of the country. 

So to get to Caracas, you actually have to go up into the mountains and then punch through a couple of tunnels, one of which is about a mile and a third long. The other one’s a little less than a third of a mile, half a mile somewhere in there. In order to get to the plateau where the city is. 

So four lane highway, two tunnels, which collectively are about two miles long, which means knocking off Nicolas Maduro and his government, is not the hard part. The hard part is then keeping the city and the country alive between the incompetence of Maduro. He used to be a bus driver and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who was touched. This country has completely destroyed their capacity for growing food and even if you remove the government and everything, all of a sudden remembers how to do it. 

You still have a couple of growing seasons before anything would be back on the sheet. So I strongly encourage you to consider what happened back in Iraq when the United States knocked off the Hussein government. Food production plummeted for a couple of years before eventually gradually recovering. In the meantime, the United States was responsible for keeping the civilians alive. 

But in the Iraq scenario, we could ship things in through northern Iraq because Turkey was an ally and there was infrastructure in place. We could ship things in from the south because Kuwait was an ally, and there was a U.S. military base right there, and there was a port, right at the southern tip of Iraq. So there were a number of ways that things could be brought in. 

You don’t have that with Caracas. The food production regions are more deeply in the interior, and you required billions, if not tens of billions of dollars of reconstruction work to bring online. And you have to ship in everything for the capital through this four lane highway. And this is a place that, based on whose math you’re using, imports somewhere between 70 and 80% of their food, mostly ultimately from the United States. 

But that’s another issue anyway. So tunnels, one that’s over a mile long, even a mild explosive by, say, a TV star who decides he wants to stick it to the Americans, shuts that down, and now you’re forced to use a road that was built before 1950 that goes up and over the mountains, which takes a lot longer now, a lot longer subjective. 

If you use the tunnel system to get in from the coast and there’s really no traffic, this is less than a half hour drive. If you go up and over, it’s maybe an hour and 15 minutes. But if you’re talking about a military occupation where the United States is directly responsible for the security and food distribution over 5 million people, that’s a whole nother problem. 

You’re talking about hours and any number of ways that things can go wrong. One of the advantages we had in Iraq that everything was a flat desert road. Mountains are very, very different. Basically, you’d be working in a tropical Chechnya. It would be ugly. And for those of you think that. Hey, air power. Yeah. No, it takes about a thousand times the energy to move a pound by air that it does by water. 

And maybe 100 times compared to what it takes to move by road. And like the Berlin Airlift, which people like to point to, we were flying things from western Germany to West Berlin, which was less than 100 miles here. The nearest airbase is what Cuba, which we’re not going to be operating from. So you’d have to set up some sort of operation on one of the outlying lines, like, I don’t know, Margarita, and then fly in from there and just. 

No, no, no, there’s no way you support 5 million people that way. So knocking off the top cut of the head off a snake, that’s the easy part. Reconstruction is an ongoing issue that would take years, if not decades, and keeping everyone alive from here to there would be just beyond what the U.S. military could handle. If this is not me saying we should do it this way, but if this were to happen, the more reasonable approach would be to do the invasion via a place called Maracaibo, which, if you look at a map of Venezuela, is this big bay to the west? 

It has no escarpment separating from the water. The major population centers are actually ports. It’d be much easier for U.S. forces to operate it. And two other things to keep in mind. Mark Cabo is a major oil producing region, and it doesn’t particularly like Caracas. It never has. And if there’s ever going to be a secession war in Venezuela, it’s going to be Maracaibo trying to go its own way. 

So the likelihood of the population being hostile is much lower, and the likelihood of being able to keep the population alive is much higher. So if if it’s going to be done, that would be the way to do it. Not me saying that this is a Latin American war. That would be fun. It wouldn’t be. But you don’t have to make it a disaster.

The Future of Piracy (ARRRGH!)

Photo of a pirate ship on the seas

As the US withdraws from its position as global protector of the seas, will the age of pirates return once more? Okay, maybe Blackbeard won’t be making a comeback, but piracy will have a role in the future of trade.

Countries are likely to fall into one of two camps: combating piracy or embracing it. And it will largely depend on self-sufficiency. Places that need a little outside maritime help (especially for energy imports), like France, Italy, Japan, and Southeast Asian nations, will oppose piracy and protect shipping routes.

For places like Turkey, where trade happens over land, and they are largely self-reliant, more aggressive policies like protection rackets might become the norm. We could even see a bloc between Turkey, Israel, and Egypt form, leveraging the different strengths of each nation.

And of course, there will be some exceptions. A country like India might oppose piracy to its west but tolerate it to the east.

The decline of global maritime stability will lead to the regionalization of control, with different powers making the rules in each route. And if there was a place to watch, keep an eye on critical energy routes in and around the Persian Gulf.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Kodachrome State Park in Utah. And today we are taking a question from the Patreon crowd about piracy. Argh. And the idea is, as it becomes obvious to everyone that the United States is incapable of maintaining freedom of the seas for commercial shipping. What sort of states fall on which side of the divide? 

Pro pirate or anti-pirate? Great question. Okay, so, the dividing line between those two groups, those who will become pirates and those who will fight the pirates basically comes down to the degree of self-sufficiency that they have. So if you have your own food, your own energy, your own manufacturing capacity, and you’re not dependent upon the seas for transport for any of those things. 

Then all of a sudden, piracy looks like a really interesting option. And you can do this as a group with other countries that are like minded or part of a network. However, if you’re on the flip side where you are dependent upon cross seas transport to maintain anything, then all of a sudden pirates are the bad guy. So let’s start with the folks who are going to need to maintain a degree of connection. 

At the top of that list are going to be France and Italy. These are countries that are regional powers, have reasonably powerful navies that are about right size to their needs. But far more importantly, they are going to need at least limited degrees of interaction with other regions. In both cases, you’re looking at countries that, for example, need to import almost all of their oil and natural gas and that absolutely has to come, from the water. 

So the French Navy, the Italian maybe are going to look, very negatively at things like pirates when it comes to their national security. Let me continue with that list of countries, Southeast Asian Japan, countries that, for a mix of reasons, are going to maintain, a naval presence. Japan is pretty self-explanatory. 

It’s very poor in natural resources, most notably energy. Southeast Asia is a cluster of countries that I think are actually going to do really well moving forward. Their agricultural conditions are pretty good, their energy conditions are pretty good. And there a series of peninsulas and mountains and highlands and jungles and islands. That means that they have to integrate via water, as opposed to integrate via land. 

And so anyone who could be sand in the gears is going to be a problem. And I can absolutely see the Japanese and the Southeast Asians for any number of reasons, collaborating moving forward. Again, somebody who would be the sand in the gears. Now, the problems that these groups Italy, France, Southeast Asia, Japan are going to face are unfortunately fairly close to home because in both cases, you’ve got blocks of powers that really don’t fall into these categories. 

Most of their interests are on land. And at the top of that list, if you’re looking from the west side in the Mediterranean, that’s Turkey. Now, Turkey is already a massive industrial power, and it has been moving in the direction of a more coherent industrial policy for the last 20 years, as the Europeans have basically started to age out. 

The Turks know in their bones that over the next generation, any product that they’re going to need, they’re going to have to produce themselves. And they’re probably going to do this with some countries, like I say, in Southeast Europe, most notably Bulgarian Romania. But when it comes to say, energy Iraq and as a region are right there, you don’t need to sell to get to either of those places. 

So you can see the Turks being very, very aggressive in enforcing basically protection rackets in the eastern Mediterranean. The only real question is whether or not Israel and Egypt are going to join them or be hostile to that sort of effort. It would make so much more sense for all three powers to be aligned in a bloc, because Israel has the air power and the intelligence capabilities. 

Egypt controls the canal and just has a sheer mass, as well as not insignificant energy reserves of its own. The three of them together would be a very powerful bloc that be very hostile to anyone who is on the outside, most notably the French and the Italians. And if this starts to feel like Middle Ages political alignments, you’re not wrong. 

On this other side of the equation in the Indian Ocean. The power to watch, of course, is India. India is, self-sufficient in its food. It’s becoming a massive industrial power already that’s going to probably double as the Chinese system collapses. But the real fun thing to keep in mind is, while the Indians do need to import a lot of energy, they’re really the first major market out of sight of the Middle East. 

So I can see them being a hybrid position to their west. They’d really frowned upon piracy to their east. I think piracy is a wonderful idea. So I actually see India as being the country that’s most likely to get into privateering. And privateering is basically state sponsored piracy. They would just have a very geographic area where they would support it, and then a very specific geographic area where they would not. 

So that’s kind of the sum up. It’s all about how you regulate energy going to and from the Persian Gulf, because when it comes to big global manufacturers trade, that’s pretty much dust in the wind at this point. And anyone who is anyone is going to be looking for a more stable partnership. And if you’re in Europe, that means you have to basically make do with what you have. 

If you are in Asia, you might be looking across the Pacific towards the Americas, but you’re certainly not going to look at going through zones that are interrupted with places like Turkey or India who are going to be out for their own good. All right. That’s all I got. You guys take care.

Should the US Stay in the Middle East?

Photo of a Marine on top of a HESCO barrier

Here’s a video I recorded while I was in New Zealand at the end of 2024. In this video, we cover a question that the US is still trying to answer – should the US maintain its presence in the Middle East?

The US has been involved in the Middle East for quite some time, but times are changing. The US is now energy independent, but US involvement in the region was never about energy for the US; involvement in the region was about securing energy supplies for US allies and maintaining strategic alliances against the Soviet Union.

The US has a few paths to choose between, and each option leads us to a very different geopolitical picture. Remember, this isn’t just about energy, this is about alliances, power, and strategy.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here on the Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand. The weather. So we’re not seeing much, but I figured I’d take a question from the Patreon forum. And specifically it is, I’ve always been told that the United States was involved in the Middle East for oil, but now that the US is energy independent, does that change? 

Is there a reason to stay? Great question. I’m not sure I’ve got an answer for you, but I can at least inform the debate. Keep in mind, until 1973, the United States was an oil exporter. We were an importer from roughly 1973 until roughly 2013. I mean, you can fudge those numbers a little bit, but about that. 

But the United States remained one of the world’s largest oil producers. Right up until the 1990s. And we most of the crude that we got came from the Western Hemisphere, with Canada, Mexico and Venezuela being our three largest sources. It was pretty rare for us to get more than 10 or 20% of our crude on a daily basis from the Middle East. 

Most of what we did get was typically, equator, Saudi Arabia. And in order to make sure that we had an interest in defending them, what they would do is park a supertanker off the US Gulf Coast and basically wait for an order. Because they knew that they couldn’t defend themselves if push came to shove. It is a Kuwait. 

That was absolutely true. Anyway, the point is, is that we didn’t use much of their crude. Most of the crude that, is exported from the Persian Gulf went to our allies, first in Europe and later in Northeast Asia. Keep in mind, during the Cold War, China was an ally. So the reason wasn’t so much for oil per se, but for the strategic alliance that we built to contain and beat back the Soviet Union. 

Keep in mind that the Soviet Union is a land based power that takes up a very large chunk of Eurasia, and there was no way that the United States, a maritime power, could counter it at all points of the compass at all times. We needed allies for that, and that means we needed allies that were willing to take a degree of risk. 

So you basically indirectly support countries like Britain and France and Italy and Germany and Korea and Taiwan and China and Japan, in order for them to be able to hold onto the alliance. And if for whatever reason, the United States proved unable or unwilling to do that, then these countries that were serving American strategic interests would have to have a deep conversation with themselves about whether or not the alliance is going to work for them at all, because if you don’t have oil, you’re talking about a deindustrialization process and a catastrophic drop in economic activity and standard of living 

Anyway, some version of that is what the conversation needs to be in the United States today. We don’t need the oil. That’s obvious. In fact, we’re even retooling more and more of a refining complex to specifically run the light, sweet crude that comes out of the shale fields. But the rest of the world needs middle Eastern crude. 

And so one of the things that we did after World War two is make that globalization for a security deal that brought us to more or less the current day. It is time for the United States to lead a conversation with the allies on what the next chapter of that looks like. Now, the last president in the United States who started us down the road of having that conversation was George Herbert Walker Bush. 

And if you remember the 1000 points of light in the New World order, that was the core of it to renegotiate the deal. We voted him out of office. And in every election since then, we’ve voted for someone who is actually less interested in maintaining the global order. I would actually argue that, Joe Biden was less interested in that than Donald Trump. 

So it’s kind of a wash. This last one. 

But this is a conversation we need to have, because if our decision is no, we’re not interested in the Middle East. We’re not interested in maintaining an alliance of nations to help us achieve our goals. Then we have to do it all ourselves. And then we have to decide whether we want to basically ostrich here in North America or massively expand the military complex so we can at least attempt to do it all by ourselves. 

Personally, I don’t think either of those are particularly attractive options. If you look at the long run of American history, every time we do truly, nationalist and really do ostrich down, something happens in the Eastern Hemisphere that draws us back in in a very ugly way that costs us hundreds of thousands of lives. But I’m not the only one who’s a decision maker here. 

And this is the conversation that we all need to have. 

Oh, one more thing. There’s more to maintaining a presence in the Middle East than just being Mr. Nice Guy for an alliance. For example, China today is the world’s largest oil importer, bringing in somewhere between 12 and 14 million barrels a day based on whose numbers you’re using. If the United States controls the ability of the region to send crude out, you could shut off China in a day. 

Food for thought.