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.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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.

Latin American Militaries Can’t Stop the U.S.

Two Chilean soldiers standing in front of a mountain

Sure, the US could probably overthrow just about any Latin American government with ease, but what happens after that?

Conventional warfare isn’t the issue at hand. The real problem lies in the geographic makeup of Latin America. We’re talking jungles, mountains, and fragmented population centers. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out what evolves from that…paramilitaries, insurgency, and a big pain in the ass for anyone trying to project power.

This has kept LatAm relatively peaceful since it’s hard to fight eachother. However, this also means that when toppling a government, most of the institutional capacity falls with it. So, the US would need a real, solid cleanup plan, or it risks a repeat of Iraq.

We’re heading towards a modern version of dollar diplomacy, where the US uses power to enforce US economic interests in Latin America. This is a messy and morally fraught endeavor that should not be taken lightly.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. We’re going to continue what we talked about yesterday with the shape of military and the reality of deployment and apply it to Latin America. Now, obviously, the United States is far and away the most powerful military force, not just in the world, not just in the hemisphere, but in human history. And a big part of why that is true is because of the deployment capability. The United States has spent the last century building up the logistics that allows it to push troops, ships, and power anywhere in the world. And when you’re talking about places like Venezuela, which are just across the Caribbean, it’s not too hard to get there. 

The problem is not often the governments the United States could probably, if it wanted to, up every Latin American government in a matter of a few weeks. The question is, what happens the next day? 

Latin American militaries have zero deployment capabilities beyond their own shores. Part of this is economic. You takes a strong trade base, technically advanced economy, in order to attract power somewhere else. 

Part of it is a bit of a gap. One of the things we learned from the British Empire is that when you have industrial technologies and no one else does, you can literally bring a gun to a knife fight and rule the world for a century or two until the technology finally catches up. And the Anglos, which include the Americans, have held that kind of technological advance over the rest of the world for the better part of the last 300 years at this point. 

And it’s only in the last 50 years that the rest of the world has kind of caught up. And that is the rise of Russia and China and the rest. Of course, there’s also a digital divide. When you throw in revolution in military affairs, which the United States really started kicking in in the late 80s and really manifested for the first time on the battlefield in Desert Storm back in 1991, and then eventually Iraqi Freedom in 2002, 2003. Details for what’s fuzzy, the United States demonstrate that it had precision as well as reach. None of the Latin American countries have anything like that. So if you were to throw the United States against all of the Latin American countries, individually or together, the battle would be over in a few days, with the United States taking very few casualties and the Americans completely disemboweling the command and control of everybody on the other side. 

It would not be a contest. The problem, of course, is again, what happens the next day. And that is a geographic problem. You see, Latin America isn’t like Europe or the United States, where we’ve got these large chunks of flat land. Crisscrossed by rivers that you can transport goods and people and troops on. It’s mostly highland or jungle. 

And in doing so, the population centers get broken up from one another. So you really don’t have something like you’d have in the Midwest or on the East Coast or in northern Europe, where you can shuttle resources and people and troops and goods back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And that’s what makes a modern economy super successful, is having very low resistance within your system. 

There really isn’t anyone in, Latin America that benefits from that. The mountains and the jungles cut the population centers off from one another. People have to move upland in many cases to get above the humidity and disease belts, which means all of a sudden you’re having population centers at five, six, seven, eight, 9000ft with all of the problems that come from that. 

But it’s better to not get disease and have those expensive so than to have diseases and maybe have slaughter land and means that the countries of Latin America cannot wage war in the way that we normally think of it in, say, Russia or China or Europe or North America. Instead, it’s a problem of fractional ization with different regions and identities and economic loyalties boiling up, not just between the countries, but within them. 

So while the Latin American countries don’t have much when it comes to conventional military forces, their paramilitary forces are an order of magnitude larger in relative terms, and they are elsewhere in the world, because that’s how you fight. You see the problem with countries like Colombia or Mexico or Venezuela or Brazil isn’t so much a conventional military threat. 

It’s a paramilitary threat that is caused by guerrilla groups and rebel groups that boil up throughout these territories, because they can’t project traditional power and cultural monolithic ness with their own, their own systems. And so Colombia has had the longest running civil war in the world. Really, it was only ended a few years ago because you had the population living on the sides of mountains at elevation, and kind of this V in the Andes and everywhere else, if you go too high, it’s too cold. 

If you go too low, it’s too humid. And too rugged. And so if you go too low, you’re all of a sudden and cocaine lands and you can have groups that can generate capital by selling illicit narcotics wherever it happens to be. Same thing in Brazil. The vast tracts of the Amazon might be romantic, but they’re impossible for Brazil to project power through. 

In fact, the last time that this wasn’t true fruit cheese, you’d have to go back. So the last war in Latin America was the send up, conflict between Peru and Ecuador in the highlands and the jungles where 300 people died at last, like a month. And that was it before that, man. It’s. You have to go back to the earlier century. 

There were two conflicts in the 1800s that were what Americans would probably consider a real war. You’re the war of the Pacific in the later part of the century, among, Peru and Bolivia on one side and the other side. That was largely a naval conflict with some desert fighting, where the Chileans wiped the floor with the other two. 

And northern Chile, they had a comma, became Chilean territory, and the only other one happened just, at the tail end of the Civil War in the United States. So 1864 to 1870, something like that. And that was a four way conflict with Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil on one side. And Paraguay on the other. And it was basically a fight over the laterals of the Rio de Plata region. 

If Paraguay had won, it would have controlled all of the rivers of those zones and, access to everything that mattered. But they lost, and Paraguay became the pathetic rump state that it is today. 

Since then, there’s been nothing worth fighting over because the countries can’t get at one another. So we’re entering this phase where the United States is far more interested in managing and dictating what happens throughout Latin America, and there is no doubt that it can kick over the anthill whenever and however, once. 

But if it wants anything productive to come out of the other side, it has to find a strategy for managing what happens after. The problem is that most of the people in the US government who have some degree of experience in that, and I’m not saying they’re great at it because these are the people who managed Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t go great, but they’ve all been fired. 

So the Trump administration is trying to do it from the top by Dick Tartt when they have no one to handle the administration. And on the other side, the very nature of the military attack means that you topple the governance structure that happens to be there already. So in many ways, it’s it’s taking the worst lessons of what we did in Iraq, where we root it out, not just Saddam, but the entire Baath party, and then tried to put on our own people over a society that didn’t have the ability to generate its own elites at first. 

And it took us been there for 15 years for them to generate the militant culture that was necessary to generate the elites. We discovered we didn’t like that at all. This time, the Latin Americans have gutted their own societies in places like Venezuela, and so the elites are already gone and we don’t have a management system. So you get two very brutal systems interfacing. 

Now that story will be different country by country. Colombia has a much more robust, elite system. The Brazilian system has a lot of oligarchs who can manage economically. And there is an opportunity for an interface there in a post intervention scenario. But if you think it’s going to be simple, it is not, at the moment, the path that we seem to be on is a little bit reminiscent of American strategies during the Cold War, where we indirectly or directly propped up authoritarian governments who would do what we wanted. 

Vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. The difference this time around is motivation. It’s much more similar to the late 1800s strategies where the United States would go and militarily knock off the government or make a fuss in order to enforce contractual norms that were not established by the US government. But there were established by U.S. corporations. And we called that dollar diplomacy back in the day. 

And some version of that seems to be where we’re headed right now. It’s going to be a very rocky road, because for the dollar diplomacy to work, the United States has to both build up institutions here to manage it and knock down institutions there to enforce it. It is kind of an ugly system, but if it works, and I’m trying to say this and as a moral point of view, as possible, it does allow the United States to treat Latin America like what it is, its strategic backyard, but then also make it its economic backyard. 

But I will warn you, where we are today, the U.S. government is unprepared for this, and U.S. corporations are unprepared for this because for the last 80 years, we have drilled into every American company that rule of law on a global basis is the first issue. And dollar diplomacy by default says it’s not.

Venezuela’s End: Next on the Chopping Block

Map of a bay of Venezuela

With renewed American activism in the Western Hemisphere, Venezuela has become just the first to get some “extra attention.” So what countries could be next on the list as the US reasserts regional dominance?

Blocking outside powers from gaining regional footholds will be a main priority, and countries like Cuba, Brazil, and Honduras all have their names in the hat.

The issue, of course is the destabilizing a government is the easy part. The real issue is what comes next. We’re talking massive time and personnel commitments to achieve any semblance of functional states…something the US has not prepared for.

The objective with all of this is security; keeping out Eastern Hemispheric powers and preventing them from establishing footholds in the region. And there are plenty of options outside of capturing presidents and military occupation to achieve that.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

What is next? So, because this isn’t just about Trump, because this just isn’t just about Maduro or Caracas or Venezuela. The bigger picture is that the United States is going to start intervening in a lot of places in the Western Hemisphere. For a more detailed version of what this all looks like, Absent Superpower, my second book deals a lot with what I call dollar diplomacy and how that’s going to unfold. 

But in the midterm, we are looking at probably three main targets. The first one, of course, is Cuba. The personality that was most responsible for this policy change in the Trump administration is Marco Rubio. Rubio is the secretary of state and the national security advisor. In the first part of the Trump administration, he was largely shut out of the white House because Trump didn’t trust anyone who knew anything about international affairs, and he wanted his own people like Steve Wyckoff, who knew absolutely nothing about international affairs and bragged about it, was proud about it. 

He wanted them to take over. Well, after nearly a year of what cost? Trump has been made to look stupid over and over and over and over and over again in the eyes of not just the allies, but the Russians and the Chinese. And he’s found himself outmaneuvered on really every issue that matters. So Rubio was able to weasel his way back with all this way. 

That makes it sound bad. Anyway, start to do his job. Trump started to let him do his job again. And Marco Rubio is a descendant of a Miami Cuban family. So the Cubans were the Miami Cubans were largely ejected when Castro took over back in the 60s. And they’ve run, like in Caracas, basically a kleptocracy that calls itself socialist, that he’s not a really fan of. 

So when he had the opportunity to get control of foreign policy to a degree, which is, you know, what Secretary of state national security is supposed to do, he started getting the Trump administration more on board with taking action against Maduro in Venezuela. Well, Maduro and Venezuela, going back 25, 30 years, have been subsidizing the existence of Cuba with cheap, gasoline products and oil that now goes to zero. 

Cuba was already facing economic catastrophe because they’ve run their system into the ground as well. And those oil imports just subsidized oil imports were really the only thing holding the country up. And now that is gone. So the American administration doesn’t necessarily need to intervene militarily in order to tear Cuba down, basically just needs to up the economic blockade a little bit more. 

And it’s really difficult for me to see, without intervention, the Cuban system lasting more than a couple years at this point, throw intervention in. And, you know, of course, that can go any number of directions based on the type of intervention. The last time the United States tried to militarily intervene, it was the 60s. It was the Bay of pigs invasion, where we basically armed a bunch of Cuban nationals to go and take over their own country. 

It was a disaster because these people weren’t trained. But as we’ve seen with Caracas, if you include U.S. Special forces, the math changes. So I’m not saying that we’re about to hit Havana. What I’m saying is there’s going to be broad spectrum pressure on the entire Cuban system to break it. What happens the next day is a different topic. 

The next country to look at is Brazil. It’s not that Brazil and the United States really cross paths economically or strategically. It’s just that it’s the second largest, country in the hemisphere from a population and landfall interview. And, we’re on the other side of the Amazon and the other side of the Caribbean from one another. 

It’s actually faster, generally, to fly to Europe than it is to get to populated Brazil. But it is a major power. It does have a lot going on, and in a world where the United States is taking a more active role in the region, Brazil is going to have to find some way to basically make the Americans happy, because the Americans hold most of the cards here. 

One of the reasons why a regeneration of Monroe is so easy for the United States is we built our Navy for the Eastern Hemisphere, and it is more powerful than every navy in the Eastern Hemisphere combined by a significant margin, probably by a factor of 5 or 7. Right now, no one in the Western Hemisphere, except for the United States, even has a Navy that’s worthy of the name, which means the United States can choose the time and the place in the nature of any sort of conflict, whether that’s going to be military, economic or otherwise. 

Brazil has a long coast. Most of the population lives in enclaves on that coast that are loosely connected to the rest of the country. It is child’s play. If the United States wants to muck with internal Brazil to do so. And if you want even current politics into the situation right now, the Trump administration really doesn’t like the current Brazilian administration, because it’s passing a lot of laws that basically block the right to lie, and it’s trying to intervene in Brazilian politics. 

So that’s political allies who I have said nice things about Donald Trump, rise back to power. It’s gotten to the point now that the guy that’s of most concern Bolsonaro, who’s the former president, who’s currently in prison for trying to throw a coup against the current president, the Trump administration has tried to get him out of jail and preferably back in power. 

So there are thousand ways that this can go, because there’s a couple hundred million people in Brazil, and it’s a big place. But the degree that Washington is going to be in pressure on Brasilia is going to be huge. Probably not to the same degree as Havana. But it’s something that is probably going to be designed to break the country as a functional unit. 

And we’re going to see that not just with Trump, but with whoever is next. Third up, here’s a weird one. Honduras. So Honduras is a Central American country that used to be run by a drug runner. Well, that drug runner was arrested, was sentenced, convicted and put in prison here in the United States. And he said some nice things about Trump. 

And so Trump pardoned him. So we now have the United States actively intervening in the politics of a Central American country to attempt to resurrect a drug lord and put him or his allies back in power. That is going to be a shit show. But once you strip the Trump and the drugs out of it, the idea that the United States is going to start treating Central America as a region that will install personally hand-picked leaders, we are going back to the 1800s because that’s what we used to do then. 

Now, will any of this work kicking over the ant hill? That is really easy. Reconstructing something on the other side that is stable, that is almost impossible. We’ve tried to do it in rock. We’ve tried to do it in Yugoslavia, we’ve tried to do it in Afghanistan. There is an argument that we’re trying to do it now. In Syria. 

It usually doesn’t work unless you’re willing to put at least 100,000 troops on a country that’s the size of Venezuela, maybe 50,000, in the case of Cuba. I don’t think we have the troops. That would be necessary for a place like Brazil. And if you want to do it in Central America, keep in mind there’s not just one Central American country. 

It’s a strip. And if you just do it to one, you really haven’t fixed anything. So you have to do it from Panama all the way to Guatemala. And most of these places are broken states, making them look like Wisconsin is not an option. And the effort of doing something would be something that would be more involved than Vietnam and Korea and Afghanistan and Iraq combined. 

So at some point, Washington will have to come up with a plan that is more realistic. But as we have seen from the last several decades of American foreign policy making, not just this administration, Americans tend to bite off more than it can chew when it comes to reconstructing or nation building an area, and it never ends well, that doesn’t mean it still won’t work for American policy. 

Because remember, the primary goal here is to prevent eastern hemispheric powers from having a foothold. And while it would be nice to have economically successful countries that are political democracies aligned with the United States, the first and foremost concern is security and economic penetration. Which brings us to the last target that the United States is going to have, and that’s China. 

China’s entire geopolitical plan is for the United States to ultimately underwrite its geopolitical success. Its navy may be large, but it’s largely coastal. It can’t project power. Its population is dying out, literally. And their whole economic model is to make product with technology that stolen from the rest of the world and then exported to undercut other, potential competitors and shove products into their market and have the United States strategically underwrite the entire thing in Latin America, it has been partially about market access, but it’s mostly been about, resource access. And that is put Chinese footprints all over the region. The United States was always going to act against that. It looks like it’s starting now. In the case of Venezuela, most of the crude eventually ended up at teapot refineries in the greater Shanghai and Shandong region. 

That’s going to obviously end. So basically you should look at any investment that the Chinese have on the ground in Latin America now as circumspect and likely to be a target because the Chinese have nothing that they can do to protect it. 

And the United States has lots and lots and lots of options shy of kidnaping. The president in order to get rid of it.

The State of the Pandemic: Latin America

This is the first in a series of newsletters addressing the state of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world. Other articles in the series cover the United States, the Persian Gulf, East Asia, Europe, and the BRICS. 

For the next few days, the team here at Zeihan on Geopolitics will be sharing a few snapshots of the pandemic from around the world. This is less a holistic assessment and instead us taking the temperature of some major countries so that readers have an idea of the pandemic’s future trajectory.
 
As with all things coronavirus, the first question is where to start. Most COVID-related data is, in a word, unreliable.
 
New hospitalizations data are wildly misreported. Useful new deaths data assume patients were tested for COVID at all, and comparing death rates from COVID across countries assumes a common quality of care. Any hospital-related or death-related data assumes that the health system wasn’t overwhelmed (and so suffered no breakdowns in data collection) as well as being very well funded and staffed (and so had the luxury of being able to test everyone). Considering how infectious COVID is and how many health personnel have died of it, those can be tall bars in places where the epidemic rages hot.
 
So for this exercise we are using the dataset that is most cross-comparable: new cases as a percentage of the overall population.
 
It isn’t a perfect measure. Many, many countries – the United States included – have wildly insufficient testing regimes. Different countries (and different states, and different cities, and different hospitals) use different criteria when determining who to test. Nor is there a best-practices policy for how to report. Just as importantly, upwards of half of all COVID cases are asymptomatic, and even those who develop symptoms are typically presymptomatic for two to five days before symptoms set in. Everyone should assume that all new case data underreports the reality.
 
Perhaps most importantly, national data like this tends to mute local outbreaks such as what struck New York City, dissolving the intense local data within a national whole that is far less dramatic. So don’t use this series of newsletters as justification for actions either cautious or rash. It is nothing more than this: our best understanding of countries’ broad trajectories.
 
The raw data comes from the COVID Tracking Project and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The Financial Times runs the data through their graphics creator. In our opinion, access to the FT’s COVID interface all by itself more than justifies the FT’s full subscription price (and yet its free!).
 
We’re going to begin with Latin America.

Geography shapes all countries and populations, and a deep study of map sets can help you know what to look for. Latin America’s tell has to do with the balance of tropics and elevation. Life in the tropics is rough: lack of winter insect kills enables diseases to run rampant, most grain-based crops cannot ripen in the high humidity, simply getting concrete or asphalt to set is an aggravating exercise. As a result, most of Latin America’s largest cities are not on the coast, but instead upland to escape the heat and humidity.

A few fun points of reference: The United States only has one post office above 10,000 feet. The bulk of Bolivia’s population lives in the Altiplano, a region whose low point is at 12,000 feet. America’s highest elevation metro, Denver, famously sits one mile up; over half the Mexican population lives on a plateau over 2000 feet higher. Colombia’s major cities perch on the flanks of mountains too high to live atop.

Since infrastructure connections are few and crowded and expensive to build and maintain, living up high is expensive. But there can be perks (beyond the view): When infrastructure is a limiting factor, populations must concentrate where the roads go. One result? Dense population footprints. That somewhat simplifies the process of providing government services, services such as health care. While that services concentration certainly hasn’t prevented COVID outbreaks in Latin America, we feel it has provided the region as a whole with (slightly) more reliable testing data than the developing world writ large. Unlike India or Indonesia or Nigeria whose COVID numbers are hilariously low (more on all three in future newsletters), we feel Latin America’s data only understates the number of cases by a factor of five or less.

But what is most obvious is that no Latin American country has the epidemic under control. Throughout the region case loads are only building, and with vanishingly few exceptions (fingers crossed for Costa Rica) the virus is now likely endemic and we do not expect to see meaningful drops in case numbers until such time as a vaccine is widely available.

For Americans, the country that matters most is of course Mexico. The two neighbors have a great deal in common.

Both are federal systems with relatively weak central governments. Most policy decisions which impact day-to-day life – like say, anti-COVID efforts – are made at the state and local level. For both countries this is both good and bad. Good in that both countries are sprawling laboratories for best health practices. Bad in that the lack of national action on coronavirus has enabled the bug to become established everywhere.

The two countries also share a certain demographic geography, characterized by cities which freckle huge swathes of lightly populated territory. That means that as the COVID pandemic stretches on, both have the opportunity to isolate localized outbreaks without needing to shut down either country as a whole. Americans and Mexicans went into the outbreak together, they are dealing with the outbreak in more or less the same way, and they will come out of it together. That hardly makes everything firelight and marshmallows, but it befits a pair of countries who are now each other’s greatest and most reliable political, cultural, economic and security partners.

To that end, our next webinar – scheduled for June 16 – will be on the status of the Mexican system, ranging from manufacturing supply chains to the local COVID epidemic to debt markets to economic and diplomatic relations with the United States. Sign up information can be found here:

REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR

Newsletters from Zeihan on Geopolitics have always been and always will be free of charge. However, if you enjoy them or find them useful, please consider showing your appreciation via a donation to Feeding America. One of the biggest problems the United States faces at present is food dislocation: pre-COVID, nearly 40% of all foods were not consumed at home. Instead they were destined for places like restaurants and college dorms. Shifting the supply chain to grocery stores takes time and money, but people need food now. Some 23 million students used to be on school lunches, for example. That servicing has evaporated. Feeding America helps bridge the gap between America’s food supply (which remains robust) and its demand (which coronavirus has shifted faster than the supply chains can keep up).
 
A little goes a very long way. For a single dollar, FA can feed one person for three days.

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA