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.

Aluminum Shortages Coming Soon

A rock of aluminum

Aluminum production in the Persian Gulf is going bye-bye. As Iran ramps up strikes on gas fields, pipelines, and power plants, the countries that depend upon cheap natural gas will no longer be able to run their smelters.

The facilities in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman account for roughly 9% of global primary aluminum. This is going to tighten supply for many key global industries like construction, vehicles, and aerospace.

The U.S. will catch a break on most of this pressure, since it relies on recycled aluminum for much of its supply. However, global supply shortages, coupled with Trump’s tariffs, will still drive up prices.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, today we’re going to continue talking about the long term implications of what’s going on in the Persian Gulf. Economically, we now know that the strait is going to be closed for at least several months. And that’s a lot of opportunity for Iranian weapons systems to take out infrastructure on the west side of the Gulf. 

We now are in the position where we need to basically write off most of the 50 years of infrastructure that has built and built there. And so today we’re going to talk about metals, specifically aluminum. Aluminum doesn’t come out of the ground like copper. It comes out as an or called bauxite. 

it’s not like iron ore where one step of refining and then all of a sudden you have iron ore steel and. No, no, no, no, it requires multiple steps. First you take your bauxite and you basically put in a big batch of caustic soda, which is a strong base, sort of thing that’ll strip the flesh out of your bones, and that will remove a lot of the impurities and concentrated into a very, very white reflective powder called alumina. 

Now, alumina is produced in a number of places in the world, and the Persian Gulf is not a major producer. You do have some in there in the United Arab Emirates and in Saudi Arabia. But collectively you’re only talking about 3% of primary production, and alumina itself doesn’t have a huge number of, uses. I mean, you can use it for pigments for if you want, like a white, white, white paint kind of thing and a few other products. 

But most of it and over 90% of it is then basically put into a, a giant and that you stick a couple electrodes in it and you just electrify the shit out of it, and eventually it process itself into something called aluminum, the metal that we all know. Now, the aluminum market is a little odd, aluminum, more so than almost any material out there, is endlessly recyclable and is easy to recycle. 

All you have to do is melt it down, and all of a sudden you’ve got pure aluminum again. And so the global market, it’s about 70% primary production that goes through the base process to become aluminum electrification become aluminum. The other 30% is more traditionally recycled. 

There is a wind quality issue, some rerecording in the middle of this one. Okay, aluminum. We are talking about a system in the Persian Gulf where we have six major smelters working from north to south Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Gutter, the United Arab Emirates, which has two, and then Oman. In all cases, the vulnerability is kind of the same. 

A drone hit on an aluminum smelter. I don’t want to say it’s not a big deal, but nothing’s going to explode because aluminum or aluminum, neither of them are flammable.  The problem is with the production cycle that is required to get there. You see, in the Persian Gulf, it is obviously oil rich. That’s what it’s known for. But it’s also natural gas rich. And oftentimes the natural gas comes up as a byproduct of the oil production. Now oil is easy to move. It’s a liquid. So you can easily put it into a tanker. And tankers coming out of the Persian Gulf is what the area is known for. But natural gas being a gas doesn’t work nearly as well. 

You can chill it down to like -280 degrees and liquefy it and put it into a specialized tanker and then ship it that way. But most countries don’t do that because the upfront cost is very, very high in the Persian Gulf. Only the Qatari do that and they do it at scale. World’s largest facility. but for everything else, they generally try to use the natural gas in another way. 

Typically they burn it in power plants for electricity, which means this region also has some of the cheapest electricity in the world. And the primary input for turning aluminum into aluminum is electricity. So you’ve got these six facilities. The vulnerability is Iran knows that attacking the aluminum plants really isn’t the way to shut it down. You just shut down the whole power grid. 

So either you hit the field where the natural gas is produced, the pipeline that takes it to a processing facility where they take out impurities so it can be used, or the pipeline that takes it to a natural gas burning power plant, or you hit the power plant itself. All of those are in the Iranian target set, and all of them have been hit at some degree during this conflict. 

And as the region runs out of interceptors, more and more will be struck. As for which facilities are likely to go down first and why? Let again, let’s start from the north. The Saudi facility is probably the one that looks the best or second best, because in Saudi Arabia they actually produce some bauxite. So this facility turns, bauxite into alumina and then alumina into aluminum all in the same place. 

And then they truck the metal out west to the Red sea. So they’re not dependent on things coming and going. But when you go down a little bit further south of Bahrain and gutter, they use local natural gas for their power. They import alumina from out of region. 

And so with the strait close, they can’t get their inputs in. Their power system is already been under extreme attack. And so both of these facilities are already operating at, well, less than half capacity. And it’s probably likely that they’re all going to be shut down, within a few days. And certainly no more than a couple of weeks. 

Move a little bit further south. You’ve got the United Arab Emirates. There’s a smelter in both Abu Dhabi and, and Dubai Emirates. The problem here is they’re on the same power grid. And because of the geography of the region, where there’s a wide swath of the UAE that faces Iran, there’s they’ve simply run out of interceptors. 

And we’re now seeing multiple drone attacks hitting hard infrastructure without interruption. So we should expect both of those to go down because of power issues in the next week or two. The final one is Oman, and it is actually out on the Indian Ocean. So, you know, it’s not directly affected by the Strait of Hormuz closure. But the Iranians have shown that they’re capable of striking things on the Indian coast already. 

They’ve already shut down the Emirati port of Fujairah, and it’s only a matter of time before they start going after the power infrastructure. Throughout both the UAE and Oman, which would be more than enough to shut this one down as well. So all of them are vulnerable in different ways. All of them will probably be going offline over the course of the next month. If this war continues. 

As for volume, these six facilities together and three of them are like the three biggest ones in the world. Produce roughly 9% of the world’s aluminum finished primary metal. The reason I’m kind of, on that is that the Chinese keep lying about their numbers, so we’re not quite sure. So if you peel the Chinese out, they’re probably 15 to 20% of the global total. 

And in a world that desperately needs to expand its industrial plant, aluminum is one of the primary limiting factors there, and we’re about to lose a lot of it. 

What this means for the United States, it’s kind of a mixed bag. In the United States, we’re kind of a flip because of policies that were decided mid-last century. 

The United States is actually uses recycled aluminum for 70% of our demand, and we only use new aluminum for about one third, 30%. So the impact on the United States is not as big. But we’re also in an environment where the Trump administration has decided that aluminum is one of those things that has to be protected. 

And so there’s a 50% tariff on imported aluminum. So we’re in a situation where we’re looking at a primary price increase because of the shortage on the international markets, on top of the 50% increase that the Trump administration has already, thrown in. And that specific tariff was not one of the ones that the Supreme Court over ruled a few weeks ago. 

So there’s an option for some price relief here for the United States if that tariff goes away. But overall, on a global basis, the, rising shortages are going to be pretty horrific. Aluminum is used in aerospace and automotive and construction and electrification and all kinds of things. And the world’s single largest user and producer of finished aluminum is China. 

And, well, they’re never getting this stuff back ever.

As Fertilizer Falls, Famine Will Follow

A machine fertilizing crops

Now that the Strait of Hormuz is shut down due to the Iran war, the impact is beginning to hit global food systems. This is coming in the form of fertilizer production disruptions in the Persian Gulf.

Potash and phosphate-based fertilizers remain mostly unaffected, but nitrogen-based fertilizers that rely on natural gas are the problem. Global urea and ammonia supplies are already being hit hard.

Prices will begin to rise, and places like China and India will face chronic fertilizer shortages. This will reduce global food production, and I think you can guess what happens after that…

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Transcript

Hey everybody Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, where we are getting a significant, unexpected storm. Anyway, obviously we’re going to talk about the Persian Gulf today. Ever since the Straits closed, it’s been a question of how soon before things get really nasty. And now we’re there. 

We’ve got, missile and drone attacks that are regularly punching through the defensive envelope on the western side of the Persian Gulf with Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, clearly, if not out, almost, very nearly out of interceptors. 

And things are getting through into those two countries regularly attacking strategic things like airports, and energy infrastructure. Today we’re going to talk about the impact this is going to have on global food supplies, which is pretty, pretty fucking damning. So there’s three types of fertilizer. There is something called potash, which is potassium based fertilizer that is primarily mined. 

Most of that comes from either the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. So, you know, don’t mess up NAFTA talks. Belarus in the former Soviet Union and a little bit more from Russia. 

Those three places are the vast majority of what is produced on the planet. That is, thank God, not affected. Number two is phosphate, which is basically fossilized bird poop. 

The big producers there are a little bit from Saudi Arabia, a bit of a problem. There’s a lot in Morocco that seems fine at the moment. Peru has some. Florida has some for the moment. The Saudi part was just single digit percentages of global supply. It’s probably going to be impacted, but not critically, because they can always truck it out or to the west. 

It’s not ideal, but it can be done. The third one is where the real problem is nitrogen based fertilizers, which are, as a rule, a derivative of an oil based naphtha product or natural gas. And here the big player is gutter, that little thumb in the middle of the west side of the Persian Gulf. Qatar, for those of you who like to pronounce it the anglicized way. In what  they call the South Pars natural gas field is one of the largest in the world, and they produce condensate there, which is kind of a hybrid oil natural gas product. But, as a byproduct, they get all the natural gas they could ever use. So it’s actually the lifting cost for that stuff is negative and it’s just offshore. 

So getting it to something to process is very, very easy. They use this to do liquefied natural gas, of which they provide 10% of the global total. That’s obviously gone. the facility that produces it has already been hit. So even if the war were to end tomorrow, I doubt it would be back online within six months. 

But today we’re going to talk about what they do with fertilizer, because They use that natural gas in order to make ammonia, and then they convert the ammonia to something called urea. And urea is natural gas based fertilizer made out of primarily nitrogen that you can spread in physical form, whether pellets or ground powder or whatever. 

And this one facility and gutter is responsible for about 11% of global urea production and that is the primary method that people apply nitrogen. There are other ways, those other ways are all ammonia based. And collectively, the Persian Gulf is responsible for between 30 and 35% of global ammonia production. And all of that has now gone to zero. 

Now, of the three nutrients, this is the one I am least concerned with in the short term, because it can be derived from either natural gas itself or oil, which can then be refined into something called naphtha, and that naphtha can go on to make nitrogen based, fertilizers. The problem, of course, is that 20% of global oil is off line because of the Persian Gulf. 

So while here in the United States, where we are a net oil exporter and just have scads of natural gas and produce pretty much all the nitrogen we need ourselves and can produce more if the market pushes us in that direction, which it absolutely will from now until the end of my life. At this point, most of the rest of the world cannot do that. 

So in the short term, because of the United States, we’re probably not going to have massive shortages of nitrogen based fertilizers. Prices will go up, but we won’t have actual shortages. But if you fast forward one, two, three, ten, 20, 30, 50 years, the rest of the world is going to be in chronic nitrogen deficit pretty much from now on. 

That’s before you consider shortages of the other materials that are likely to manifest in the years to come. So prepare for an environment where food production on a global basis stalls and then crashes. With some areas affected far more than others, the one that should be at the top of your list for not being able to maintain output is going to be China, because they import pretty much all of the inputs that they need to either make their own fertilizer, or they just import the fertilizer directly. South Asia, India also looks like it’s going to be significantly under pressure, unless they can find a way to manage access direct to the Persian Gulf themselves, which is a feasible option for them. But it requires them thinking significantly different about their security policy. But now they absolutely have the impetus to do so.

Iraq, Oil, and a Break for Chevron

Iraq Map With An Oil Sign licensed by Envato Elements: https://app.envato.com/search/photos/c777eb9c-aa98-4f24-b652-fc6ac6385c3c?itemType=photos&term=Iraq+oil

We’ve all heard the claim that the Iraq War was a war for oil, but American energy firms barely wanted to touch Iraq after Saddam fell. Things might be shifting now.

U.S. sanctions on Russian firms, such as Lukoil, forced Iraq to nationalize projects. This opened the door for Chevron. Should they come in, production in the West Qurna 2 oil field could double.

Once Iraq’s parliament gives the green light, Chevron would mark this as a much-needed win, as it would be the largest recent international asset and comes as the firm could be losing ground elsewhere, such as in Kazakhstan.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Good morning from Colorado today we’re and talking about oil in Iraq. If you guys remember back to Iraqi freedom and the Iraq war in the war on terror, you know, 20, 23 years ago now, there is a lot of argument back then from people who didn’t like the George W Bush administration that this was a war for oil. 

We were pre shale revolution at that point. So the US was the world’s largest importer of crude and natural gas. Now we’re the world’s almost largest exporter of both based on how you’re doing the numbers. But if you remember back to how the war concluded, American oil interests moving into Iraq were thin. There were a few people who moved into Kurdistan in the north, and that was about it. 

The reason was a combination of things. Number one, there was an active insurgency going on. And while oil companies generally have a high tolerance for damage, in this sort of environment, when the 100,000 American troops in the country were like, no, that’s just way too hot for us. Second, the Iraqi government, post-Saddam was wildly disorganized, and sharply sectarian and basically on off in a stage of civil war in parts of the country, parts of the country that had oil. 

So a a few companies did move in, but it didn’t really work out for any of them, and they ended up moving out. That may may be changing now. The Trump administration has sanctioned Russian oil companies, most notably Lukoil, in this conversation, and Lukoil was the manager for a really easy, shallow, huge field called West Qana two, which is in the southern part of the country near the secondary capital of Basra. 

And after 20 years of operating in the country, they were able to get oil production there up to about 450, maybe almost 500,000 barrels a day. But now they’ve been sanctioned and they can’t US dollar markets. And if you’re producing crude for export, it’s all denominated in US dollars. So they have basically had to shut themselves out. 

So the field was nationalized by the Iraqi government. It’s currently being managed by something called the Boss Route Oil Company, which is a state entity, and they have entered into negotiations with America’s Chevron to take over the project. Now, none of this is done. There is no ink to even be dry yet, but, Chevron is in the first position to enter negotiations. 

Take it over. And the current expectation we’ll see is that a year from now, they will be the sole operator, or maybe in league with the Iraqi government. This would be the single largest asset that Chevron has picked up internationally in quite some time. Almost a half a million barrels a day. And unlike Lukoil, which doesn’t have great technology or capital access, Chevron is one of the big five of the world. 

And we would probably see the West kind of two project expand to over a million barrels a day in a very short period of time, probably no more than five years. It’s a technically simple field. It’s large, it’s close enough to a population center to be able to tap labor, but not so close to be a security problem. 

And it already has an existing pipeline going to the coast, and it already has an offloading facility. So in terms of supporting infrastructure, everything that it would need is already there. About the only obstacle at this point is would have to be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, which can be a little snarly, and that will depend upon relations with the United States. 

But one of the things that prevented American companies from getting involved the last time around is that the only real stable part of the country was up north in Kurdistan. And so that’s the first place people went to sniff around. Well, Kurdistan is viewed by the rest of Iraq as secessionist. So if you cut a deal with the Kurds in the north, it was very difficult to get a deal on the south, on top of that, the technical challenges for the fields in the North were really, really sticky. 

And if you wanted to get the crude out, you either had to send it north through Turkey. And the Turks hate the Kurds and the Kurds hate the Turks. Or then you had to send it south through the Arab part of Iraq. And they didn’t like the Kurds anyway. So basically anyone who took the early deals with Kurdistan, lost out on the South, independent of the fact that the South was a difficult operating environment. 

But no longer applies today. And Chevron has no assets in Iraqi Kurdistan. So from a geopolitical point of view, this actually seems to be set up to be a meaningful deal for Chevron, which, considering they’re probably going to lose what they have in Kazakhstan because of the Ukraine war, from them is a fantastic development. They’ve always kind of been second fiddle to Exxon. 

This is one of those situations where they might actually have a significant leg up.

Qatar Bribes Its Way into Idaho

Flag of Qatar

Let’s first establish that Qatar is not building a new base in the US. They are funding an expansion of an existing US facility used to train F-15 pilots. And second, Qatar isn’t interested in those Idaho potatoes, they’re looking for something a bit more nuanced.

Qatar and the US don’t see eye-to-eye on most things, but both countries are willing to overlook those differences in favor of what they could gain from the relationship. The US maintains basing rights in Qatar for CENTCOM. Qatar gets some sweet and tasty leverage.

Washington, once again, finds itself in a political and ethical gray zone with another misaligned country in the Middle East.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to take a question from the Patreon page. And it’s about this new military base that supposedly the Qatari government is building in Idaho. So, first let me clear up what’s going on and then give you an idea of what to expect. First of all, it’s not a fundamentally new military base. 

It’s an existing facility that is already used for training foreign forces, most notably the Singaporeans. And it’s going to be training Katari, F-15 pilots just like it does in Singapore. F-15 pilots. What’s different is that the Qatar are investing a huge amount of money to expand the facility. Normally, when foreign forces are training with the United States, we either do it there or if they do come here, they come to a preexisting facility. 

It remains under American control. It’s not going to be a Katari base, but it is definitely in the gray area. Because the Qatari are up front paying for the expansion. That’s not something that has ever happened, ever in American history. But to say that Qatari law is going to hold in Idaho, that is also not correct. 

So there’s a lot of misinformation out there on all sides. What we do need to discuss, however, is the Qatari. Qatar is a country in the Middle East. It’s that thumb that has under a million citizens. I think it’s like 400,000 citizens. And it sits on arguably the world’s largest natural gas field that has extraction infrastructure. 

There might be a couple in Russia that are bigger, but they’re untapped. And that means that the Qatari are just stupidly rich. By most measures, Qatar is the richest country in the world on a per capita basis. And as a result, Qatar has been using that money to basically carve out an independent foreign policy for itself. This includes a significant amount of terrorist financing. 

They like the Taliban. They like the Muslim Brotherhood in, Egypt. They used to be a big fan of Hamas until that became politically unpalatable, in Gaza. They’re backing probably the wrong side of the civil war in Libya. And, and, and and and the United States has its Centcom headquarters in Qatar and did so through the entire war on terror. 

And if that sounds weird to you, that’s because it is, the US military realized it needed a large footprint to coordinate its operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest. And when it looked around for possibilities, it really didn’t find many. Obviously, it wasn’t going to put it in Iran. Obviously it wasn’t going to put it in Iraq, because that was a war zone was going to put in Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia said, no, we weren’t going to put it in, Kuwait because that was too vulnerable compared to what was going on in Iraq. 

Oman was neutral and wasn’t interested in that, really just left Qatar. And, the Qatari, while they were in all meaningful ways on the opposite side of the equation from the US military on every military issue that mattered, really wanted the Americans there as a geopolitical counterweight to the local powers in the area, most notably Saudi Arabian Iran. 

So whenever you’re doing anything in the Middle East, keep in mind that you’re going to be having some very strange bedfellows. And that is no different here than anything else. 

What is different is that the Qatari are completely shameless when it comes to seeking out people who are craven and are just desperate to be corrupted, and they try to spread their influence by using flat out cash. 

So if you remember the disgraced and I think now imprisoned, former Democratic congressperson, Bob Menendez, yes. There we go. From Jersey. He’s the guy who was found with, literally gold bars in his home because he was basically pimping his services for foreign governments. That was Qatar money. The Qatari basically bribed him. 

And so now what? We have the Qatari paying for infrastructure for the US military. We should view that in the same light. It is a bribe. This is also the same government that gave a, jet to the Trump administration. That’s basically to call it Air Force One. But when, Trump is out of the white House, it goes with him. 

That is also called a bribe. And they really don’t care who they bribe. Their goal is to get other countries to take policy decisions that back their position, because they’re a small state and in a straight up fight, they wouldn’t do very well. So they spread the money on thick. And if you’re going to condemn people on one side, like the new Jersey congressperson for taking gold bars to sell out his country, then you have to consider that everyone else who is taking money also maybe isn’t the most ethical person. 

But before you go around condemning everybody, keep in mind that we have had a base in Qatar for almost 25 years, and it is a ridiculous, but that is the cost of being a great power, apparently.

Everybody Wants to Bomb Qatar

Hands holding the flag of qatar in front of a building in the middle east

Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Qatar mark a significant shift in Israel’s positioning in the region. Israel has made it clear that they are willing to strike anywhere, regardless of alliances or presence of US bases…bad news bears.

Qatar may be filthy, filthy rich, but all that money couldn’t buy military aptitude. These strikes caught Qatar with its pants around its ankles, something that rival Arab states weren’t upset about.

However, the bigger story here is that Qatar hosts america’s regional military headquarters, and Israel only gave the US a ten-minute heads up before the missiles started flying. Whatever influence the United States had over Israel military actions has quite simply dissolved. And THAT will be noticed globally.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here comes to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about what went down on September 9th in the Middle East. Specifically, the Israelis dropped a few bombs and missiles on sites in the country of Qatar. That’s a little thumb like thing in the Persian Gulf. Small country, less than a million population going after some Hamas targets. 

Hamas, of course, is the military slash political group that used to run Gaza and is now on the receiving end of the Israeli occupation campaign of Gaza. Three big things. Oh my God, so many things, but three big things that come from this. First of all, let’s talk about Israel. Israel has never, ever, ever bombed anyone in the Persian Gulf. 

I mean, they’ve gone after Lebanon because it’s right there. They go after Syria, especially as it’s fallen apart. And, they’ve gone after Iran most recently in a big way. But the last time they bombed anyone else was like in the 1980s, they took out a nuclear reactor in Iraq. And before that, you’re talking about the Arab-Israeli wars of the 1970s and 1960s. And 1950s. 

This is a significant escalation. There’s been an expansion of their capabilities as they’ve gotten the Joint Strike fighter. They’ve gotten better weapons from the United States that have better range. Looks like what happened is they flew down into the Red sea and launched missiles over Saudi Arabia to hit Qatar. They didn’t do a direct overflight. 

Probably. 

And this level of aggression, this willingness to ramp up this newborn policy of taking action wherever and why ever, is immense. Because, you know, Qatar is a U.S. ally. Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally. And for the Israelis to be so brazen, this is something that is going to continue until and unless a significant series of countries that includes up to in the United, including the United States, levy some sort of massive economic or military penalty on Israel for acting like this way, at the moment doesn’t seem like that is in the cards. 

And honestly, if you’re in the Persian Gulf, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, like Qatar or the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, there’s really nothing you can do. So this is the new norm of Israel just dropping bombs wherever in the region it wants to. And that will cause any number of political complications and strategic complications, because at the moment they’re going after Hamas. 

But there are other militant groups that the Israelis are not big fans of. And should a government in the region become more hostile, the Israelis have now demonstrated that really doesn’t matter what your air defense systems are, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, they have some shiny hardware, but it’s clear they don’t know how to use it very well. 

And as the Israelis discovered with Iran, even if you’ve got stuff that you’ve integrated over decades, it really can’t stand up to the technology the Israelis can bring to bear. So all the royal houses of this region are now on notice. And if they do things that the Israelis don’t like, they can expect visits by explosives. 

The one thing that was really holding back the Israelis before, from doing things like this is the idea if you knock off the government, you could have Sunni jihadists boil up and turn the area into a scarred wasteland that would eventually cause problems for Israel. 

Well, some version of that has happened in Syria and Israel looks just fine. So if the nightmare situation is not something to be avoided, then destabilizing the neighborhood is something they don’t have a problem with. So that not all of that is number one. The Israeli side, number two is the Qatari side. Qatar is a small country. 

doesn’t have a lot going forward except for a big natural gas field, a little bit of oil. And in doing so, it’s become one of the richest countries in the world in per capita terms, because there’s very few people, the locals are the fattest humans in history because the national security program has run by Doha, the capital is to get everybody, heart disease and obesity so that they can’t protest. 

So, I mean, these are a whole country of taboos, that basically do nothing but eat all day, and they’re serviced by a couple to maybe 4 million today, expats who basically take care of their every whim. 

As a result, no shock that they don’t know how to use their own military equipment. But they do have, however, is ambition and arrogance and just supreme levels. The ruling government of the of the ruling family, is convinced that they were ordained by Allah himself to be a major power. And since they were late to the game, they basically went out and cut deals with everyone that nobody else would deal with. 

So the deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, they deal with Hamas, they deal with everybody, in order to prove how important they are. And then they throw a lot of cash at whatever the issue happens to be. So they are on the opposite side of a lot of the other Sunni governments in the region. And so while no one in the region is thrilled that the Israelis have gone and basically proven how powerless that they are in the face of a superior military force, there are a lot of countries, most notably, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, that are pointing at and kind of going, because they are not loved at all. 

And seeing them taken down by such a big notch and made to look so incompetent and so impotent, is honestly very rewarding to a great number of people. What impact this will have on Qatari foreign policy moving forward is unclear, but certainly Israel is indicating to them that there’s certain lines they just can’t cross or bombs will fall. 

The government was not targeted. This was all targeted against Hamas groups and the Hamas groups were only kind of sort of taken out because they use longer range weaponry. But we now know with refueling that the Israelis could easily get there and back with more precise weapons. So something to watch for the future. In the meantime, Qatars on notice. 

Third, and perhaps most importantly, is how the United States fits into this, Qatar is the location of Centcom headquarters. This is where the United States coordinates everything throughout the entire region, including the recently closed down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a lot of countries in the region and up to and including Israel until very recently and until last week, thought that having Centcom headquarters in Qatar made Qatar bulletproof because the Americans offered an express security guarantee to the country. 

Well, that has proven to be wrong. And we now have a really interesting situation shaping up. Yes, the United States is willing to allow countries to bomb places where it has bases and not do anything that makes the United States look toothless. And for Israel, specifically, Donald Trump is now in a position where he can’t get the Israeli government to do or to not do anything. 

The Americans were notified of the attack less than ten minutes before the missiles flew. No. No way, no way. Enough time to get through the chain of command for Trump to say, call up Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister of Israel. Say, don’t do this. So the United States is now being actively ignored by the country, in the region that is supposedly its closest religious demographic and strategic ally in the region. 

That is not a good look for an administration who thinks that it’s tough, and that will have consequences here, there, and a lot of places in between.

Syria and the Return of the March

Woman holding a Syrian flag over a vehicle

Syria has been riddled with problems for ages, but will all that chaos boil up and spill over? The short answer is that it’s unlikely, but let’s unpack it.

The reason for this is due to a mostly forgotten concept of a “march” or a stateless zone on the edge of organized states. Given Syria’s fragmented and distinct regions, the country has never been fully cohesive; having marches prevents that chaos from spreading further. These areas would typically remain lawless, getting periodically raided to keep anything from festering up, until a neighboring power intervenes. Since Israel, Turkey, and Iraq are managing Syria’s borders, chaos can’t breakout too far.

On a larger scale, marches might be making a comeback. As deglobalization sets in and demographics become more strained, many regions could begin to resemble these lawless, stateless zones.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Yosemite. For the obligatory I’m backpacking video, but I hurt myself, so I’m in the tent for a few hours, but, my feet are messed up. Anyway, we’re going to take a question from the Patreon crowd. And specifically, do I expect the chaos in Syria to spill over to other countries? 

Yes and no. Just not in a traditional sense. Keep in mind that there’s basically seven series. You’ve got the coastal zone, which is the Alawites, a mountain zone, which is Christians. You’ve got the interior cities of harm, Hama and Aleppo, which are, Sunni Muslim. You’ve got Damascus, which is basically a fortress city. You’ve got this thin line of people that live along the Euphrates, and then you’ve got the desert. 

Right now, ISIS or Islamic State, whatever you want to call it, has been banished to the desert. But in the past they have conquered large chunks of the territory. Anyway, the Alawites out on the coast were the ones who ruled Syria until recently. They were pretty much hated by everybody. And now they have been overthrown. 

There is now a Sunni group that is attempting to cobble this country together. But, the Assads, those are the Alawites who were in charge, had the advantage of Hezbollah backing them up and Iran backing them up and Russia backing them up. And this new government doesn’t have any of that. And so it’s already descended into basically the second phase of the Civil War. 

This one will probably in time be much, much, much, much worse than the first one. And remember, the first one generated millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead. 

Okay, what you have to remember about Syria is until we got to the after World War one, decolonization effort, this was never really a country. This was a zone where, because of all the differences in geography, was basically a bunch of mini states at best, or was amalgamated into some other governments, like, say, the Ottoman Empire or one of the caliphates of the past, which means you should never expect Syria to be a stable place, like it was under the Assad dynasty. 

Instead, what we’re seeing is a return of a concept that we in the West have pretty much forgotten about, called marches. A march is a zone outside of civilization. You have your cities, you have your infrastructure, you have your military and economy. But there’s a zone beyond you that is not owned by another country. It’s stateless. 

And in zones like that, chaos reigns unless and until a superior power comes in and imposes their will on it. And if you look at this region back through history, it has been a march for most of history. 

Marchers basically take two forms. First form is this stateless zone. When you can get some crazy group like the Islamic State that comes in. But that only works when no one who has a country who is bordering the march has the ability to interfere. Alternatively, if anyone who is born in the region does have the ability to interfere, they basically come in from time to time, burn everything down, and then go home because they know there’s nothing here that is worth, building up themselves. 

So for serious specifically, you have Israel, you have Turkey, you have Mesopotamia. And if you look back ten years ago, when Israel was occupied with domestic issues and the Turks had taken a vacation from history and Iraq was in civil war, well, then the Islamic State does pretty well. But that’s not the situation we’re in now. The Turks are on the roll. 

The Israelis are being very aggressive against any potential challenger and Iraq has managed to consolidate itself into a new nation state. We should get used to this sort of concept in lots of areas as demographics decline, as globalization really kicks in and wrecks economies, there’s going to be a lot of states that just the center won’t hold, and we’re going to see a lot more of the world looking like Syria, looking like a march than we’ve become used to in the last 75 years.

Should the UAE Invest in a Tech Sector?

Photo of interior of computer chip

The UAE is pouring money into building a tech sector, focusing on semiconductor fabrication plants and data centers.

While semiconductor fabs are central to chipmaking, they require immense technical expertise, specialized labor, and integration across thousands of precise steps; meaning this is a nothing sandwich.

Data centers are more achievable, but that doesn’t mean they’re a good idea either. The UAE would need to subsidize access to scarce high-end chips, figure out the high cooling costs (because desert climate, duh), and even then, the geographic limitations will prevent them from becoming a global hub.

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Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page and specifically about tech and some of the things that are going on in the Persian Gulf, specifically, a number of the Persian Gulf Arab states, most notably the United Arab Emirates, are splashing around a lot of cash and trying to build a tech industry. 

There are two forms of taking. The first is they’re trying to get kind of like what happened in Arizona, a high end semiconductor fabrication facility. And second, they’re getting a data center. Two very different pieces of technology that have very different requirements. So let’s start with the semiconductor fab facility. 

Semiconductor fabs like the kind that we now have outside of Phoenix, the one that’s being built outside of Columbus, Ohio. 

The ones that are in Taiwan, are incredibly sophisticated. And what people tend to forget is that these are not just like assembly locations. They bring some of the most advanced machining in one place. They bring some of the most advanced materials into one place. They bring some of the most sophisticated designs in one place. And basically, you’ve got something in excess of 10,000 pieces that come together on the floor of the fab. 

It’s not simply an issue of making a semiconductor. You have a high end machine that’s called a extreme ultraviolet machine that does etching, and you have to dope. Well, let me let me back up. Just show you the whole thing. The whole process. Step one. You buy some really, really expensive sand silicon dioxide. That’s just pure, pure, purified. 

Usually only comes from the United States. You melt it down and know that you put in a seed crystal. And over the course of several days, sometimes weeks, you grow it into a crystal that weighs more than a car. You then slice it laterally into wafers, and then you take those wafers into your semiconductor fab facility, because these are all done in different places. 

And then you hit it with lasers that come out of the EV system. You dope it, you bake it again, you dope it, you bake it again, you do that, you know, ten times, 20 times, 90 times, and eventually you get a bunch of semiconductors on your disk. You then break those into pieces and test them and eventually incorporate them into actual hardware, like, say, a motherboard or a flash drive. 

And then goes into the intermediate products trade. So fabs are essential. Absolutely. But they are one step in an entire process that has thousands of steps. They just happen to be where a lot of these steps come together. They are not the high value added part of the process. That’s going to be almost everything else. Does that mean that they’re not important? 

No. Does it mean you can do it with unskilled labor? No. 

the United Arab Emirates have skilled labor? No. So if the UAE were to pay the $2,025 billion it takes to build a top rated facility, then they would have to do exactly the same thing that the Chinese have had to do import the labor to make it run the most exacting work that is done in a high end fab facility is the quality checks at every step. 

And that is something that if the chips are above, say, 20 to 30 nanometers, the Chinese can’t do it at all. And the idea that the UAE could do it is absolutely laughable. So if they did built this, no one would want to probably work in the unless the pay was absolutely immense and you would have basically a white elephant project generating very error prone, high cost items. 

That’s probably going to happen. What is less unlikely would be, say, a data farmer or data center. This doesn’t require nearly. The maintenance work is not nearly as, worker intensive. Basically, you get a bunch of GPUs. You build into something called a module with a bunch of Dram and Nand chips. Now, Dram, our memory chips and Nand are long term memory chips. Flash memory, short term needs power. Nand is, long term memory, not as quick, doesn’t need the power, and the GPU is all the processing. So you basically build a module and then you put a bunch of them in a server, and you put a bunch of server blades in a rack, and you put hundreds of racks in a room with really good cooling, and then you just let it run. 

Data cables coming in, data cables going out. Traffic comes and goes, you can house AI algorithms on it. You can. How’s your AOL account on it? Whatever you want. Two problems. Number one, all of the hardware is really, really expensive. And demand for the high end chips is very, very high. So most server farms do not have the sub seven nanometer chips that are, for example, necessary for most AI applications. 

Second problem latency. As a rule, you want your data center to be as close to your demand as possible. So the United States of various quality sets of about 10,000 data centers. And we try to put them either right outside of a population center or somewhere roughly in the middle of the country for trans coast traffic. So the idea that the UAE, with a couple first world cities is going to need a couple of data centers makes perfect sense. 

The idea that it’s going to be a global information hub, no, because there are no countries near it that generate the volume and quality of data that would want to go all the way to Dubai and Abu Dhabi before then moving on. So if the Emiratis decide to go down this path. This won’t be nearly as much of a white elephant project as, say, building a fab facility, but they would have to subsidize it in order to get the high end chips. 

And it appears that’s exactly what they’re doing. There is one of what’s supposed to be one of the world’s most advanced data centers, under construction in the United Arab Emirates right now, if everything goes to plan really does with these things, if everything goes to plan, it’ll become operational before the end of 2026. But it will be in a very expensive place to operate because the single largest expense for data centers is cooling its electricity. 

And I don’t know if you knew this, but the UAE is in a near equatorial desert. So the operational costs will be massive. And while labor is not a huge component of a data center when it comes to costs, they still don’t have the labor force to do even that. So if they do this, they seem to be doing it. 

It will be very expensive and it’ll just kind of be a feather in their cap. It won’t be actually something that a lot of people want to use.

What’s Up with the Middle East: Syrian Dysfunction

Photo of a plaza and monument in Syria

Next up in the Middle East series is Syria. They’re enjoying a calm period right now, but the new President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is walking on eggshells to avoid the deep-rooted problems that have plagued Syria for ages.

Those problems run the gamut, from ethnic to religious to geographic divisions. Think of Syria as a patchwork of groups that love fighting with each other. And maintaining stability in a place like that is hard, especially now that backing from Russia and Iran no longer exists.

Unfortunately for the Syrians, nobody is all that interested in helping them out. Western powers aren’t willing to step in, regional powers benefit more from Syrian dysfunction, and the Gulf states can’t figure out how to proceed. All that to say, Syria should enjoy this period of calm, because the storm is undoubtedly coming back.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Zion National Park, going down the old Conservation Corps path that they blew out of the side of a mountain, because that’s how we did things in the 30s. Anyway, we’re continuing our Middle East week, and today we’re gonna talk about Syria. We have a new government that controls most of the territory and has incorporated most of the factions. 

But, don’t expect this to last. We’re at a kind of the calm before the storm. Basically the new leader whose name escapes me. Yeah, that looks right. Isn’t going to last. I mean, I wish him the best, but he basically has inherited all of Syria’s core problems without any of its advantages. Syria is made up of a half a dozen completely different regions, different sectarian groups, ethnic groups, different religions in different geographies, and they don’t pull together. 

So you have your Druze on the mountain down in the South. You’ve got the Arabs and what we would consider the Fertile Crescent, the three big cities of harm Ham, Aleppo, and then the fortress city of Damascus. You’ve got the Alawites and the Christians in the mountains and the coastal enclave in the northwest. And then you have the Kurds and the kind of step back territory along the Euphrates to the northeast. 

And then, of course, ISIS is running around like mad in the desert in the middle, in the war before now, all of these factions were at one another’s throats to some degree. There were limited alliances, at least within specific geographies, but there was really no way for the single government in Damascus to exercise the writ over the entire territory. 

That doesn’t change. What has changed is that two of the powers on the outside, the Russians and the Iranians, are no longer providing a and I say this tongue in cheek, a little bit a stabilizing influence. You see, the Iranians and the Russians were backing the, Damascus government of Bashar al-Assad. To the hilt with equipment, with men, whether it was, Russian fighter pilots or Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon that were controlled by Iran didn’t really matter. 

All of it, was funneling in to help the central government hold the line in the Civil War. Well, that’s obviously stopped because the central government fell. And this new guy is now in charge. But it’s not like anyone else is stepping up to help him. The big news recently is that the European Union and the United States have decided to drop sanctions on the Syrian government to kind of give them a chance, but they need a lot more than that if they’re going to go anywhere. 

Also, we’ve had so let’s just say, some weird political bedfellows in the last couple of weeks, Donald Trump actually met the new Syrian leaders and shook his hand. This is a guy who was executing civilians under Sharia law less than a year ago. So, you know, apparently we’re doing that now. But the United States and the European Union made it very clear that any aid, was far in the future and would be contingent on a large number of factors that are mostly out of side of the central government’s control. 

So the Civil War is kind of at a pause, but don’t expect that to last. Oh, that’s kind of steep. We might hug the side a little bit more. The other players that would matter. You got two local and then two further abroad. The two that are local are the Turks and the Israelis. And they’re okay having Syria as a more or less failed state right on the doorstep, because it means that they can go in there and do whatever they want, bomb whoever they want, go after whatever surgeons they don’t like. 

Which in the case of the Turks, in the case of the Turks, it’s the Kurds who are America’s best friends in the region. And in the case of the Israelis, it’s pretty much anyone but the Druze. So if Syria was to consolidate into a functional state, they’d be able to resist these sort of punches. And the Israelis and the Turks are just fine the way things are right now. 

So having a semi failed government and a semi anarchic system that spins up its own internal violence for its own reasons, this is fine. Further abroad, the two big players. Well, this is called a cluster of players. The Gulf states of the Persian Gulf. Since most notably, the three most heavily involved are Saudi Arabia, which tends to support the Sunnis, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, who are a little bit more freeform with their assistance. 

The three powers do not see things the same way. They backed different factions at different times for different reasons. And now that everything’s kind of in flux, they’re kind of sitting on their hands. Funny thing, when Donald Trump was going on his, make up of terrorists, campaign in the Middle East, he stopped in Saudi Arabia and basically asked for cash to invest into the American economy because the American economy is slipping into a recession that Donald Trump’s tariff policies have cost. 

And the Saudis basically said, yeah, you know, you’ll make up whatever number you want in your PR campaign. We’re not going to give you even a third of that. And we’re not giving anything to, Syria that is not specifically backing our interests until such time that you come up with the security plan for the place. So everyone’s just kind of sitting on their hands and waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

And in Syria, you probably will not have to wait soon. Just keep in mind that should this new government actually start to consolidate the two countries that are closest with the most military forces available and the most to lose, Turkey and Israel are certain to take actions. So anarchy. So I formed anarchy is probably the best. We’re going to get. 

And if it lasts through the summer, I would be very, very, very surprised.

What’s Up with the Middle East: Turkish Dominance

Image of a line of Turkey Flags with kids riding on the back of a tram in Istanbul

We’re moving onto the region’s most dominant country – Turkey. Sitting at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, Turkey’s military, economy, and political identity have all been shaped by this unique identity.

As deglobalization sets in, Turkey (and more specifically, President Erdoğan) is keen on seizing an opportunity at climbing the regional ladder. Thanks to solid geography, good demographics, and a long history of outlasting regional upheaval, the Turks have the perfect foundation. All Erdoğan feels he must do is continue consolidating power, amend the constitution, and his seat at the table will be cemented for the remainder of his life. And then he can project his ‘image’ of society onto the wider region.

It’s not all butterflies and rainbows for Turkey though. They’ll need to continue growing the industrial base to be globally competitive. And some of those outdated economic views could harm Turkey’s long-term prospects, despite the deglobalized world we’re heading towards.

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Transcript

Hey all Peter Zeihan here we are continuing this week series on the Middle East. And we’re going to now talk about the most powerful country in the region by far. And that is Turkey. Turkey is an industrial base that produces every other country in the region combined. It has a GDP roughly the same size as every other country in the region combined.

It has a military that’s more powerful than every other country in the region combined. In fact, it’s the second most powerful army within the NATO structure. Second only to the United States. And the first thing to remember about Turkey is that Turkey is Turkey. It is not Middle Eastern in the traditional sense. It is not European in the traditional sense.

It’s part of the Caucasus. It’s part of the Eurasian sphere. It’s part of the Balkans, it’s part of the Levant, it’s part of Mesopotamia, it’s part of all of this. But it is of none of them. It is its own thing. And if you start your understanding of Turkey by thinking it falls neatly into one or the other, you’re thinking about it wrong, which is one of the many, many, oh, so many reasons why the Europeans never understand the Turks.

Anyway, what the Turks are thinking right now at the top of the government is thinking right now is that they are at an interesting moment in history. There are two massive trends going on to the north that are colliding with one another, and both of them have limited time. The first one, of course, is the Ukraine war, because never forget the Crimea specifically and broader parts of the Russian and Ukrainian spheres at various times in history, have been part of the control of what today’s Turkey considers to be its normal birthright.

There are plenty of ethnic Turks throughout the Caucasus, in the southwestern Eurasian region. Of course, in Crimea itself. And so there’s no version of any future of the Ukraine war matter. Who wins, who loses where? The Turks are not going to be indelibly involved. And whatever that looks like. The second piece, of course, is the European resurgence and semi military unification that is happening both because of the Ukraine war, because of withdrawal.

The United States under the Trump administration, the Europeans are having to fight against decades of low birth rates and an industry that is designed around global exports, which is no longer functioning. And they’re having to find a new way of doing it. And part of the way they’re doing it is by converting some of their civilian industrial capacity to military production.

And for those of, you know, your European and especially your German history, you know where that can lead. But both of these trends are temporary. The demographic situation for both the Russians, Ukrainians and the Europeans is terminal. There is no version of a globalized world where Europe is still a single entity. There is no version of a globalized world where the Russians have the income that’s necessary to hold their own structures together.

As the United States leaves, both of these systems are doomed. And even if the U.S. stuck around the demographics are so bad, they’d be doomed anyway. The question is time frame. Is this five years? Is it 15 years? Is a 25 years? We really don’t know. History’s never been at this sort of turning point before unless you’re in Turkey.

The Turks have seen this all before. They’ve seen demographic decay on their borders. Going back to Roman times. They’ve seen a situation where wars on the periphery have flared as two forces fight off against each other and then both flare out. They saw this with the Persians, what is today the Persians against the Arabs. They are used to seeing other powers in the periphery rise and fall, because their demographics have always been good, their geography has always been good, and there’s always been a degree of insulation.

Doesn’t mean that it’s always perfect. Turkey has had its share of imperial rises. This falls as well. But the essence of what makes Turkey Turkey has always been there. And that brings us down to the personalities that are hoping to shape whatever’s next, because we have this many historical and geopolitical forces coming together at once, anyone who’s left standing on the other side is going to be able to kind of write their own ticket.

So that guy is the president, who goes by the name of Erdogan. Now at Iran has been at the top of the Turkish political heap since he kind of returned from an internal semi exile in 2000. Basically, the old government of Turkey tried to get rid of him, didn’t stick to being prime minister and now president.

And he’s now in the process of trying to amend the Constitution so he can be president forever. He refers to his enemies as traitors of the state. He lambast the educational system and the media and the financial sector is all being against him and against the will the people sound familiar to anyone at all? Anyway, Erdogan is hoping that he will be the dominant personality in all of your age.

In the not too distant future. And that he, as leader of Turkey, the most stable of the countries throughout this broader region, is going to be able to leave the Turkish imprint, the other one imprint on human history, from now on. And it’s not narcissistic egoism. That’s right. Well, it’s not it’s not just narcissistic egoism, because he too has done this before.

If you go back to the foundation of modern Turkey in the aftermath of World War One, we had a guy named Ataturk, who is generally considered the father of the modern incarnation of the state, which is something history hasn’t gotten around to amending yet. I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, Ataturk tried to drag the Turks out of the Ottoman Empire, which was semi religious.

The caliphate was headquartered in Istanbul. The Europeans saw the Turks as technologically backwards and neo hominids who had invaded from the plains Eurasia, descendants of the Mongols. All that good barbarous stuff, about half of which is true. Anyway, they were definitely more technologically backwards and say the European states were, as the Europeans were industrializing.

The Turks relate to that game out of Turk dragged Turkey by the ear, kicking and screaming into the modern age, introduced things like democracy and industrialization, took away their hats, changed the culture, and in doing so, he put the military as a secular force in charge of the country for the next couple of generations, ebbed and flowed when Ataturk was dying, he gifted, if that’s the right term, democracy to the country.

And a lot of the people in Turkey thought that they shouldn’t have given up their religion or their culture. And so we got this back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It lasted until about oh, 2002 when, at Iran came in and basically grabbed both sides of that political argument by the ear and forced them into a single mishmash time.

He, I mean, sort of singular system that he now rules. So the secular military that used to throw coups, that has been completely brought under civilian control, all of the religious figures that used to issue, directives against the government, all those have been brought to heel and are under everyone’s control. So we have now one turkey.

That is a combination of the best and the worst of both sides of that old political argument. So from veteran’s point of view, he’s already the guy who’s been remaking Turkish history for a couple of decades. And the next logical step is to remake the entire region. So from his point of view and he’s got a point that if there’s anyone who knows how to navigate these particular waters, it’s him, because he’s already done it.

All he has to do is continue to shove all of Turkish society into a box of his shape, design and size. So he’s trying to force his political allies in the Parliament to allow him to run for president again. I think it’ll be like his 14th term or something. I mean, it’s not like fourth term. And if that’s successful, he will basically be president for life.

He’s already, I believe, 71. He’s not rumored to be in ill health. Doesn’t mean he’s a great modern manager in many ways. He’s like like Donald Trump. His idea of what industry should be is what it was 50 years ago when he was a kid. So technology is not something he understands. Modern society is not something he understands.

People who are young, you know, under 50 are not people that he understands. Again, it’s unfamiliar. And so he’s introducing what may well be some of the very problems that are going to plague Turkey for the rest of the century. For example, the Turks have a very solid industrial base, but it’s kind of middle tier for quality.

Anyone in the Middle East who can afford it doesn’t want Turkish goods. They want German goods. And anyone in the Middle East who can’t afford Turkish goods wants Asian goods because they’re cheaper. So Turkey has yet to define what it’s going to be in this new era. All we know for sure is Erdogan is committed to being the big man when everything breaks.