Things I (Don’t) Worry About: Water Wars

When people start talking about wars over water, everyone pictures tooth and nail, Mad Max-esqe fighting…but our imaginations might be getting away from us here. Allow me to paint a more realistic picture for you.

There are some practical limitations to water wars. Water isn’t easy to move and redirecting rivers or directional flows is time consuming, expensive, and hard to do. To add another layer of complexity to the mix, most water sources are held by countries of power (you know, water tends to help with things like food production, industrialization, growing populations, and military development). So, when a dry country decides it needs water, there’s often not much it can do.

Sure, there are always exceptions to the rule. Egypt depends on the Nile River, Central Asia relies on those diminishing glaciers, and the Middle East will have some choice words over dam construction. However, the majority of countries that lack water resources, simply cannot conquer or secure water from other nations.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from snowy Colorado today. We’re going to do another one in the ongoing open series of things I do and do not worry about. This is one that I do not for the most part worry about, and that’s water wars. You’ve got to admit it’s a sexy idea. The idea that a country that is dry and desperate for water is going to march on another country to take it.

But a few things to keep in mind. You can’t take the whole hunter with you. Water is very bulky and very dense and very difficult to move and it clings to itself with friction. So pumping that is difficult. So you’re not talking about just conquering a river basin and somehow redirecting it. You’re talking about conquering the river basin and occupying it.

And for most countries, that’s a pretty heavy carry under any circumstances. So that’s number one. The bar is high. Number two, the countries that have water are the world’s major powers and the ones that do not have water are not major powers. Why? Well, they have water because if you have water, you can grow food. If you can grow food, you can industrialize yourself.

If you can industrialize yourself, you can build your own military without having to import a lot of equipment. And if you don’t have water, you don’t get to do any of those things. So there are very, very few places where you’ve got a dry country next to a wet country where there’s even a theoretical possibility of the dry country doing anything.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any exceptions. There’s just very, very few. Let me give you three. And really, that’s it. Number one, Egypt country that’s on the river. It needs the river to survive upstream. Ethiopia has been building some dams. I can see some scenarios where the Egyptians would spend special forces in to damage or destroy the dam.

The problem with that strategy now, though, so the dam has been built, the lake behind, it’s being filled. So if the dam were to go away, so would Egypt. So, you know, number two, Central Asia. The glaciers of Central Asia have been desiccated for about 50 years, ever since the Soviets built a series of water diversion systems in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to grow cotton in the desert because they didn’t want to be depended on American cotton or Egyptian cotton.

You fast forward that 50 years and the glaciers are pretty much gone and the flow and the rivers that I’m going through dry are falling precipitously and the whole area is desiccated. So I can see a scenario where a dry country, Uzbekistan, which has the third largest post-Soviet military marches in and just takes over Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan so that its own people have something to drink.

The third one involves the Middle East, and this is actually an issue of the West countries taking issue with the dry countries. There have been issues in the past in the Jordan Valley where various countries, most notably Lebanon, have built dams on rivers that would impede the flow to the Jordan. The Israelis have a problem with that. So they bombed the dams.

Similarly, you’ve got a wet country, Turkey and a dry country, Iraq and Syria, where the Turks have built lots and lots of lots of dams in southeast Turkey called the Grand Anatolian Project, in order to improve agricultural possibilities for the southeastern part of Turkey and provide an economic ballast to dissuade, say, Kurdish separatism. However, if you happen to be downstream in Baghdad, this is a bit of a problem in your places drying out.

But again, you’ve got a wet country, Turkey, doing things that are messing with the water table in a dry country, Iraq. And there’s not a lot that Iraq can do about it. So there are plenty of things that are worth fighting over in the world. Water is arguably one of them. But the countries that don’t have it don’t have the capacity to go get it.

So I don’t worry about that one.

Geopolitics of Terror Groups: ISIS and ISIS Khorasan

With the recent attack on Moscow, I received some requests to do a breakdown on the geopolitics of ISIS. First things first, there are two largely unaffiliated groups at play here – ISIS-Khorasan and the more widely known, ISIS.

The original ISIS (aka the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) primarily operates in the middle Fertile Crescent region. In recent years ISIS has not done well, losing control over all the territory it once controlled, being reduced to little more than a strategic nuisance.

ISIS-Khorasan has no specific region in which it operates, but rather targets Shia populations and engages in violent activities against secular governments it perceives as oppressing Muslims, such as Russia.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Frigid Colorado. We’re taking a entry from the Ask Peter System today in the aftermath of attacks by the Islamic State of Khorasan on Iran and more recently on Russia. I was requested to do a geopolitics of ISIS video. So here we go. Couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, ISIS’s and ISIS Khorasan are two very different groups. 

So I can do a geopolitics of ISIS. ISIS’s core power is in the middle Fertile Crescent between western Syria and central Iraq. So basically, you’ve got the Euphrates Valley that goes from the Persian Gulf up through central Iraq into western Iraq. Northern Iraq then comes back down to the cities of harm, Hama and Aleppo or Aleppo, excuse me. 

Well, that is the zone that technology and people and ideas and trade are percolated back and forth through a lot of human history, especially the earlier days. And in that zone, the thing to remember is that the crescent is very, very, very thin. While you do have Mesopotamia in the east, where the Tigris comes into play, in the zone between the rivers, it is a major agricultural zone. 

And while you do have more rainfall in extreme western Syria, when the Lebanon mountains merge with the the highlands that eventually become Anatolia in the middle, you only have the Euphrates. And even in modern days with industrial level technology, in many cases, the green belt where you can grow food in the central Euphrates region is only a few miles from north to south. 

And because of that, they’ve never been able to develop kind of the dense population centers because there’s never enough food production. And the zones that you can do something with are very, very skinny and very, very worn, which makes it very difficult to patrol it. So think about this this way. If your city was a half a mile wide but 20 miles long and the proportions are much worse for Iraq, if you were of your police station is getting all the way down and all the way back would be difficult. 

You want something that’s spread out from a central point like, you know, say, a Chicago or Houston or Dallas or most of our cities. It just makes a civilizational penetration much more difficult and eventually hit hard. Does it do anything? So this is the zone that ISIS’s from water is limited. There’s only one source aside from the oases, and either you control it or you don’t. 

And so geopolitics, that region tend to be very visceral and very desperate. And this is part of the reason why ISIS is so violent, because it is a battle for survival among groups every single day. Now, it also means that groups like ISIS are not long for this world. If you look at the region from a broader perspective, if you go further west, you hit the Levant, which has powers like Israel and the core of Syria to go north. 

You get into Anatolia and the Turkish territories, and if you go east, you get into Mesopotamia, which is have been a cradle of civilization for quite some time. This zone in the middle can’t do anything. And the zone in the middle has never been powerful enough to penetrate into any of those other three zones. So the only time this zone in the middle matters at all is when all three of those major areas are off light at the same time. 

And if you go back to ISIS’s heyday ten, 15 years ago, that’s exactly where we were. Syria was in a civil war that the central government had almost lost. Iraq was reeling from the effects of the American occupation, was not able to patrol its own territory, much less things on its fringes. And the Turks had not yet reemerged from their century long self-imposed geopolitical sleep. 

It was a very different situation. And so ISIS was able to form, recruit, expand, dominate groups and basically go on a series of small genocides. It was pretty nasty. Now, that’s not our situation. The Syrian government has, for the most part, stabilized. Even if the civil war is not quite over. The Turks are back in the game and are crossing the border regularly. 

And Iraq is a power worthy of its name again. And so ISIS is basically fallen from controlling territory to just a few outposts that move around and a general insurgency in some of the least valuable property in the Middle East. So that’s icis. ISIS Khorasan is different. ISIS chorus on things that ISIS’s a bunch of wimps because they don’t kill enough people, specifically Shia, ISIS’s primarily Sunni. 

I Scorsone as well. And they see Shia as the worst apostates of all and so they are not interested in holding territory. They are interested in taking the battle wherever it may go and wherever there’s a secular government. And so that has taken them against the Taliban, which they think are a bunch of horses. Let’s take it up against the Iranians who are Shia. 

And that’s taken them against the Russians, who they see as oppressing their fellow Sunni followers. Because of this, you can’t do a geopolitics of ISIS Khorasan because they’re not interested in territory. They don’t have a home territory. They’re actually fairly egalitarian as to who they take into their ranks as long as you’re not a Shia. And in the case of the Russian space, there are a lot of subjugated Muslim populations with probably the Uzbeks being the most important that are willing to join violent groups. 

And so one of the things that it appears to be with ISIS course on is they’ve been recruiting pretty aggressively from within the former Soviet sphere. Uzbeks, Tajiks, some Kyrgyz, maybe some to some Turkmen, and hopefully not, but most likely. So Dagestan is Chechens about Kurds and Tatars. Those are all people who live within the Russian Federation today. 

So the danger here for the Russians is very, very real from a security point of view, an analogy, a logical point of view. But you can’t do a geopolitics of ISIS’s or ICE’s Kurdistan because they don’t have a core territory. They’re a splinter group that’s based entirely on ideology. So ISIS is not the sort of group that can expand much beyond its current footprint and certainly not beyond that part of the Middle Euphrates, where from time to time they can kind of expand its course on as a different sort of category. 

They are not constrained and it could very well be coming to a place near you. That was way more inflammatory than he deserved. While there have been certainly plots interrupted by ISIS because American interest, there’s no sign that the uproar in the United States for that yet.

A WTF Moment in the Middle East

In President Biden’s State of the Union address a few days ago, he announced plans to build a floating dock to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. This dock would help provide significant food supplies to this area, but at what cost?

You can probably imagine how the Israelis feel about this floating dock, but is that really the worst thing? This move by the US will carry significant diplomatic and strategic repercussions, but a shift away from Israel and some other Middle Eastern powers might be exactly what President Biden is going for.

With the potential for a reshuffling of Middle Eastern alliances and relationships, the opportunity to buddy up with a much more powerful country – like ahem, Turkey – is on the table. There’s no telling how all of this will shake out, but its likely that US policy in the Middle East is shifting.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Have kind of a weird one for you today because I’m not sure if I’m really no idea where it’s going, but this event has the potential for remaking a lot of things with U.S. policy in the Middle East in general. If you guys watched the State of the Union address a couple of days ago, almost a throwaway line that people like blurbed about for 5 minutes and then immediately forgot.

Was the Biden administration is committed publicly to building a floating dock that services the Gaza territory in order to get humanitarian aid in. The idea is that the throughput will be enough for at least 2 million meals a day, which would be roughly one third of the food demands for the territory. Now, remember, Gaza is basically a walled, open air prison camp, and so they grow no food themselves.

They’re completely dependent upon aid. And in the aftermath of the October Hamas attacks on Israel that killed some 1600 people, just horrific attack. The Israeli counter effort to try to root out Hamas has destroyed probably two thirds of the housing stock within Gaza. Probably more than that of their infrastructure. And they’re gearing up for another assault in the southern part of the strip to go after what they think are the remnants of Hamas, which is where now most of the population has been huddled because the rest of the strip has been destroyed.

Already, we’ve seen about 35,000 deaths among the Gaza population, which is over 1% of the pre-war civilian population. And if the Rafah attack happens over at least half of that number of casualties again. So this has already become the single most high casualty conflict in recent years that is not in sub-Saharan Africa. And it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.

And there is no version of a future where Gaza is self-sustaining. They don’t generate their own energy. They can’t grow their own food. Everything comes in from aid from somewhere else. And because of the war, the Israelis have basically blockaded the entrances, except for some very, very specific circumstances. Anyway. The Biden administration let me rephrase that. Biden personally, when he was vice president, if you remember, Obama hated everybody, didn’t want to have conversations with anyone.

And so he basically sent Biden to do all the talking, especially in the Middle East, because there was a region. Obama wasn’t interested in anything, but he was really not interested in the Middle East. So Biden has a first name, a relationship with most of the leaders across the region, and he and the Israelis did not get along at all, especially Netanyahu.

And I mean, let’s be perfectly blunt here in Kenya, who is an asshole and no one likes him, but he’s an effective political leader when it comes to managing a coalition. And his attitude hasn’t changed at all during the conflict. If anything, it’s hardened. And so he’s basically ignored what everyone has said about the conflict pursuing Israeli national interests.

I don’t mean that in a bad way. There is no way that Israel will be secure so long as Hamas exists. And I don’t see a way to destroy Hamas without destroying Gaza. But between that immovable rock and that irresistible force, the United States is attempting to find a third way. It won’t work, but it’s attempting to find a way to allow the Palestinians to at least live from.

So you have to have a degree of respect for at least that. Here’s the thing. There is no version of what the Biden administration has now pledged itself to do that meshes with any version of Israeli national security, regardless of who is in charge in Jerusalem. Even if the left wing peaceniks took over in Israel, tomorrow, they would still be opposed to this.

This this cuts to the core of Israeli survivability. And there is broad support for the military operation in Gaza across the political spectrum despite the civilian casualties. So there is no way there’s no way that the Biden administration is unaware of this and there is no way that the Joint Chiefs didn’t explain to the cabinet of the Biden administration that if we do this, we then also have to bring in a logistics team in order to deliver aid by small boat to this dock.

And then we have to put boots on the ground in Gaza to set up a truck distribution system to get the aid to the people. Remember, 2 million meals a day. This is on a much larger scale than what went down with the Berlin airlift. And with the Berlin airlift. You could just drop it and fly away. Here you’re talking about having to deliver it.

The U.N. can’t operate in Gaza in war. Only the U.S. military could. So we’re now talking about having a larger U.S. military presence in and around Gaza than it has in the rest of the Middle East put together. There is no version of that that the Israelis are okay with. And it begs the question, what happens the next day?

So let me give you the caveat first. It’s a floating dock. The military could just leave. This isn’t like the Afghan evacuation in Afghanistan. The Kabul airport was an air bridge. Moving things by air is incredibly expensive and is a hell of a bottleneck. And you can only fit a few hundred people on each individual craft when you’re dealing with a naval operation.

This is the sort of thing the U.S. excels at. And if the decision was made to pull the plug, every U.S. military personnel could be out of there in a few hours. So we’re not setting up for a repeat of that. But we are setting up for a military footprint that is significant in a place that has absolutely no strategic value to the United States.

Also, Hamas is still very active in this region. Israel’s not done. So there will be attacks on U.S. forces. Biden knows this. Biden knows all of this. And so what happens the next day? It feels like the United States is preparing to breach the Israeli relationship. And if you do that, there are a number of secondary decisions that have to be made in a very short period of time.

Now, remember, the Biden administration is the administration that ended the American involvement in Afghanistan and has slimmed down our involvement everywhere else in the region to very, very thin bones. Going from here to a full pullout through the entire region. That is very possible. But think of the alliances that are forming up within this region right now. The Israelis have succeeded in building up diplomatic relationships, not just with Jordan and Egypt, but with Morocco and with Tunisia and with the UAE.

And they’re inches away from having a normalized relationship with Saudi Arabia. If the United States decides to cut and run from Israel, that means all of these countries are on their own. Now, there’s any number of ways that the U.S. can disengage. One of them is to induce other powers like the Arabs and the Israelis, to work together out of a sense of desperation.

This could do that. But that would also mean that the United States is preparing to cut its connection with the slave states of the Persian Gulf. That would be gutter the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, three countries that important vast quantities of labor abuse them horribly and then send them home when they’re no longer useful to them.

This would mean an end to that, too. Now, if if, if if this is the Biden administration’s plan and if if if the Biden administration wants to have influence in the region after this, it would have to make a partnership with another player. The only option is Turkey. And we have seen renewed diplomatic connections between the Biden administration and the other white administration of Turkey over the course of the last couple of months.

Now, the Turks in the current government don’t like the Israelis very much at all, but they by far the Turks have the most powerful military in the region, arguably more powerful than everyone else has put together. If there is to be a post Israel post Saudi American position in the region, it has to be with Turkey. And so there’s already been multiple meetings at the assistant defense secretary level to figure out how we can get along again, because those relations have been poor ever since the Iraq war started back in 2003.

So this has the potential to be game changing for the region. And as for someone who has kind of been sick of dealing with this region for the last 20 years, I got to admit it’s a kind of an attractive approach. The Israelis are carrying out a military operation that is making everybody squeamish, even countries that don’t much care for the Palestinians, and using this as a way to not just reduce relations with the Israelis who are apoplectic about this dog, but the Saudis and the Emiratis as well.

And to get along with a country that is much more democratic, which is much more strategically viable, that is much more capable. That’s a good trade. But there’s a lot of water that has to flow under this bridge as it’s being built before we get there. And we’re not going to have a good idea of just how committed the Biden administration is to whatever plan until such time as the stock is operational and or we see a significant shift in American relations with the Turks.

But we should get some good data points on all of that in the next two or three months.

Why the Middle East Is So Aggravating (yet so difficult to leave)

The Middle East has been a thorn in the side for the US since day one, so why haven’t the Americans just abandoned ship? To understand why the US is still involved in the Middle East (and openly facing these potshot-esqe attacks), we need to breakdown this region…

The reason this is top of mind is the recent attacks on a US base in Syria carried out by Iranian-backed militants. Before I dive into these specific attacks, let’s look back at this region’s geopolitical history.

There’s a complicated history of trade routes and European colonization, but things got spicy when oil was discovered and geopolitical tensions flared up. This led to a lack of what I would call value-add governments, a spamming of militant groups, and eventually, post 9/11 involvement by the US.

So, the US stepped into a political and social nightmare and thought they could throw a bandage on it and be done; clearly that didn’t work. Fast forward to the present and the US is still involved in the region, clinging onto the ever-so-slight semblance of peace and order that’s been established…until now.

Despite years of trying to get to the bottom of this, the question remains – is continued U.S. presence necessary to prevent further instability or would withdrawal empower regional players to address security concerns independently?

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan just taking a walk after this guy dumped on us. The big news today, it’s February the fifth, is that overnight local time. Iranian backed militants in Syria attacked another U.S. base. It’s the first significant attack since those three American soldiers were killed early part of last week. And the United States launched a bunch of retaliatory strikes against Iranian backed militias throughout the region.

Anyway, this is the first significant action by them since. And again, it looks like a drone got through and hit the barracks again. This time it wasn’t American servicepeople who were killed, but a half a dozen Kurds that U.S. Special Forces were training. Let me explain how we got into the Middle East and why it’s difficult to get out.

And then we’ll put this into context. So I’m going back roughly very roughly a thousand years. The Middle East has not been a place that anyone wanted to be. It was on the way somewhere. So you had your more advanced somewhat very loosely using this term technocratic societies with little higher value add in their economic systems in the West.

And then you had East Asia and to a lesser degree, Southeast Asia and South Asia that produced goods that you could not find in the West, things like spices and porcelains and silks. And so the trick was to figure out how you could link these two economic systems together. Despite the vast distances involved, and from roughly 1000 to roughly 1500 A.D., the solution was coastal vessels, camels, caravans.

The problem with all of those things is you had to go through any number of intermediaries, especially for the land routes. And since the Sea Rats weren’t safe, most people stuck with the land routes. This meant that the folks who lived in between in the middle to the east of the Western nations or go the name found themselves having to pay massive markups because you’d send your go east and you’d bring the cargo west.

And every few miles or a few dozen miles, there’d be another middleman who would take the cut. And so the cost of these products didn’t double or triple or quadruple, but typically went up in cost by a factor of a thousand or so. And so what became what were not necessarily everyday goods, but not exactly considered exotic goods out east became the the cream of the luxury goods in the West.

And so the trick was to how do you how do you avoid those markups? The solution was set upon by the Spanish and the Portuguese, who developed the technologies to sail farther from the sea excuse me, far from the shore with old coastal vessels. If you happen to anchor, which you had to do every night within sight of land, there is a reasonable chance that somebody who lived in the neighborhood was just going to come and take your ship and kill your people and take all your stuff.

So that’s one of the reasons why they tend to prefer the land routes. But with the Portuguese and the Spanish developing deep water navigation, they were able to do an end run around that entire thing, interface directly with the East. And so from roughly 1500 until roughly 1900, the Middle East just didn’t matter. It became a complete backwater and eventually the Western countries industrialize.

And when they came back to the Middle East, to an area that had not industrialized, you know, you bring a knife to a gunfight enough times and the locals pay attention. And so you basically had the Brits, the French and the rest divvy up the entire region into mandates and colonies. Now, why was the West able to pull that off when the Middle East just kind of stayed at the same technological level?

And to be perfectly blunt, the answer is rainfall throughout the Western countries. In Europe, it rains. Rain means that you can grow crops in any number of areas. And if that gives people an interest in pursuing their own economic destinies. Also, you had winter in most of those areas. So in the off season, farmers could be working on something else.

They weren’t exactly getting law degrees. But the point is the overall skill level of the population steadily creeped up. And when you’ve got a lot of people who are invested in stability in the system, even if it’s not a democracy, you get a degree of political stability, economic advancement, technological acumen that you just don’t get in the Middle East and the Middle East.

Very few places have rain where you do have water. It’s in a relatively narrow band either right on the coast or along a river that makes it very, very easy for a political authority to rise and dominate that specific geography. And in doing so, basically you reduce the entire population to slave status. That does not give people a lot of interest in pursuing stability for the system makes revolutionaries very popular.

But it also means that the power of the state is just almost total, making it very, very difficult for anyone to make something of themselves. So you will get centers of learning throughout the Middle East who did absolutely preserve the Western knowledge during the Dark Ages, but they never applied it themselves. They never disseminated it with her in their own cultures.

They were basically just libraries maintained by monks. Oversimplification. 100 years of history. I recognize that. But you can’t deny the economic trajectory of the Middle East versus the West. And then once the West cracked the code on industrial technologies and they started having gunpowder and cannon and the Middle East was left behind, there is no contest at all.

So now today, the economies of the Middle East matter more to the world today than they have for most of the last half millennia, largely because of oil, because there is an asset those industrial economies need in order to function. Now, this isn’t so much an American problem directly because North America is self-sufficient and not even self-sufficient in oil is a significant exporter of oil.

And if the Middle East were to vanish tomorrow, we’d have some adjustments on things like crude quality. But within a couple of years would be totally fine. However, the Europeans significantly less so specifically since the Russian crude is no longer part of their equation. Parker Now, where does that bring us? Well, it means that anyone who goes in the Middle East after about 1950 is faced in a very different environment from what was faced from 1008 to 1500 when it was just a place you had to push through or from 1500 until roughly 1950 when the West was industrialized.

But the Middle East wasn’t. Now, the Middle East is, and no one’s going to say that a group like ISIS in Syria is like the pinnacle of human technology, but it’s really easy for them to get explosives and AK 40 sevens. So it’s no longer a contest like we saw from 1919 50 between an industrialized Western imperial system and a completely non industrialized, almost tribal Middle Eastern system.

You’ve got a different makeup now. Now, the governing systems of the Middle East themselves are also in play and very much in flux, because before 1950, you basically had a series of what could be best called Fortress Political Systems, where by dint of geography, you know, maybe they had an oasis like Damascus, maybe they were surrounded by desert like Egypt, maybe they were a mountain fastness like Iran.

It’s a little difficult to get in and out. And some of these areas are a lot more difficult to conquer than others are around really being at the top of that list. But you introduce industrial technologies to this area and the post-colonial post-World War two environment, and all of a sudden they’re not just drilling for oil. They’re building roads.

They’re buying military hardware. And it makes for a very different mix. You get this incredibly brittle, top down, concentrated political system that is absolutely in hate bubble of providing the people with the level of technological progress that is possible elsewhere in the world, because there’s very little to work from aside from cash from oil. And you apply that in a world where society is weak as well.

And the result you get lots and lots and lots and lots of militant groups. And if you want to back one versus the other or one versus government, that’s fine. But even if you win and the militant group overthrows the government, well then what you’ve taken what little order exists in an area and it’s turned into chaos. You get a complete societal breakdown, as we’ve seen in places like Egypt and Iraq and Syria in recent years.

So enter the United States in the aftermath of the 911 attacks. The Bush administration felt that the best way to fight al-Qaida was to make sure that the countries that allowed okay to function would go after it. So after the Afghan operation, we discovered that al-Qaida scattered to the winds, and we found out that a lot of the recruits were coming from Syria because that was how the Syrians got rid of their own dissidents.

A lot of the troops, Taliban troops that were in Afghanistan fled through Iran to parts unknown because the Iranians were like, Well, we hate these guys, but we don’t want to deal with them, especially since they don’t like the Americans very much and then the Saudis necessarily the government itself. But a lot of elements within Saudi Arabia were part of the ideological and financial underpinning that made Al Qaida possible.

How do I know that? Because we allied with them back in the eighties to form the Mujahideen, which eventually became the Taliban. Anyway, so the U.S. is looking at this region, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq 12th partner. And any of them wouldn’t be fun conquering all three at the same time to get after a militant group just doesn’t seem like the right task.

And so the solution that was struck upon was to knock over Iraq and occupy it with armored tank brigades, which is not the way you pacify a population. You want ground infantry for that. The idea is Tehran and Damascus and Riyadh. None of them thought the U.S. was going to do this. And so when it did it with tanks and left the tanks there, they’re like, shit, There’s nothing to stop the United States from turning on us.

And while Iran was, to a degree protected by its mountains, they had a little bit more confidence would be able to put up a good fight. The other two had no such confidence and they knew that if the United States decided to come for them that their regimes were done because there was no civil support, there was no technical competence, there was no cohesion.

Well, it worked. And those three, three countries went after al-Qaida for us and are the primary reasons The strategy is the primary reason why Al Qaida is, for all intents and purposes, no more problem is that we didn’t declare victory and went home. We tried to make Iraq look like Wisconsin with the results that you can imagine. Because, again, there’s nothing to build from in terms of society.

We overthrew what stable order there was and replace it with nothing. Now, fast forward to today. The Bush administration felt they had no choice but to go in. And, you know, we can debate whether it worked out well or not. First phase of the plan I think worked. Second phase, Obama changed nothing. Despite his rhetoric, Trump said he pulled out but left troops in places like Syria to fight ISIS because no one no one in the US political system wants to be blamed for being the guy who allowed that militant group to come back.

But here’s the problem. The countries in these areas are never going to have the foundation that’s necessary to form a country in the way that Americans or Westerners in general or even Asians see it. And so if your goal is to prevent the creation or the operation of the resurgence, the specific type of militancy, you will be there forever.

And that’s one of the reasons why we call them the Forever Wars, because we found ourselves going to war with a military tactic as opposed to any specific group. And while most of our troops are out of the region now, what happened earlier today in Syria is the best that we can hope for. Unless the strategy changes, we are never going to be able to turn these countries into something that we would normally recognize as a peer or is even someone in the same category as the nation states that we have in most of the rest of the world?

That’s not how these areas work. They never have. They don’t have the economic geography to try. And so we’re left with a fun little discussion. We have to have option A is stick it out forever, do what most of our forces have been doing in the region since the operation was slimmed down under Trump and hunker in your bases and watch and if something like oasis bubbles up again hit it with a hammer.

Go back to your bases and watch some more. And if you do that, you’ll be there forever. And while you’re there forever, other militant groups who have their own ideas of who should be in charge will take potshots at you. And that’s what we’ve been seen with the Iranians being the instigators. This is the new normal. This is the old normal.

This is just what the region look what’s option to leave from a casualty point of view. It’s easy. We’re never going to make this area look like something that we want. Danger if you leave. Is that a group that you specifically don’t like is going to boil up? Now, let me put that into context. Part of the reason that we’re still there is we find the tactics of ISIS beyond repute.

And we’ve seen that replicated in Hamas in the beginning of the Gaza war. We’re not going to be able to defeat a tactic. But the fear is, is if we leave, more of these groups will boil up in a shorter period of time and eventually start not just attacking the locals, but our interests in the region as well.

The problem with that theory is that it assumes that there’s something better that can happen if we stick around. Something to keep in mind, this is an area, a fortress cities. And historically speaking, when you don’t have an external power like the United States in those fortress cities, start to enforce their own writ on the area. Now, we have enabled Baghdad to recover from the Saddam and the occupation areas, and it’s doing a pretty good job of holding its own.

What we’re doing against groups like ISIS is basically taking some of the unknowns out of the equation for the other two major powers in this region, which are Damascus, Syria and Turkey. If the United States were to vanish overnight, they would have to deal with these unknowns themselves and we would have a much more aggressive effort from both countries to deal with groups like like ISIS.

That is more normal. And so we’re actually in this weird situation where U.S. forces that are remaining in the region, even if they’re just staying in their camps, are actually have become the single greatest reason why the government in Damascus still exists, because under normal circumstances, other regional powers would have moved in and smashed these groups that were patrolling out of existence.

And that means the Turks get more involved. That means the Syrians get more involved, and that means the Israelis get more involved. And in that sort of contest with Mesopotamia kind of acting as an anvil, we probably see the end of the Syrian government within five years. Of course, it would be bloody and horrible because this is a region that can barely grow food itself and it uses a lot of those energy imports or exports to buy food that it imports.

So the capacity here for an outright civilizational collapse is very, very real and agreed. The presence of U.S. forces is one of the few things holding the darkness at bay. Now, whether that is considered an American national interest or not, talk amongst yourselves.

The Middle East, After America

FOR MORE ON THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD, SEE DISUNITED NATIONS

PURCHASE DISUNITED NATIONS HERE

The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

With a new “10 years later” epilogue for every chapter, comes an eye-opening assessment of American power and deglobalization in the bestselling tradition of The World is Flat and The Next 100 Years.

PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK HERE

To kick off our ‘Post-American’ series, we’ll be looking at the Middle East. The best way to break this down is into three chunks: the role of the US as it leaves, the role of regional powers as they rise, and the role extra-regional powers might play.

The US has been bopping around the Middle East for quite a while now, but why were they there? The US didn’t need the oil, but their friends did…so the US stuck around to keep the allies in the game. But with the US now a net oil exporter, American interest in the region writ large has dwindled. Additionally, the US isn’t looking to help China – the region’s primary export customer – grow, so most of what is keeping the US engaged are just those legacy anti-terror fights.

The US exit strategy will play a role in what regional powers step up…the options are a ditch and run, appointing a successor, or crafting a strategic balance of power that the Americans can manipulate from a distance. Once the US is out, Turkey is the one to watch. The only thing that might keep them from leading the Middle East is being too involved in other regions. Saudi Arabia and Iran are the other two players to keep an eye on (and Israel could play a role, too).

The external powers that could play a role here are quite limited. Outside of the US, the only real country that could (and would want to) project power in this area of the world is … Japan. And with the Japanese/American partnership, the US will empower them to do so.

The best part of all this movement and power transition is that the US just doesn’t give a f***.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

TranscripT

Forthcoming shortly…

Demographics Part 10: Problems in The Middle East

Coming to you from Milford Sound in New Zealand.

The demographic situation in the Middle East can be explained by three factors: water, oil, and food. Water prevented the population from expanding. Oil generated the capital needed to industrialize and help the population grow. Food security will ruin all of this.

The Middle East doesn’t have a ton of moisture, so most populations remained relatively small and geographically concentrated. This kept demographics in the traditional pyramidal structure. Once oil was discovered, these populations had the money to industrialize. This enabled Middle Eastern populations to grow beyond the land’s carrying capacity.

As the population expands, you naturally have more mouths to feed. The only way to sustain a growing population is through imports and subsidies. While Middle Eastern countries have retained their pyramidal demographic structures, these populations have become increasingly unstable.

Since the Middle East is so dependent upon globalization, any disruptions to the global system could turn catastrophic. Combine a potential food crisis with wealth inequality and political instability, and the degree of civil breakdown in the Middle East could be devastating.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
 
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
 
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
 
And then there’s you.
 
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

TRANSCIPT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Milford Sound, one of my favorite places on the planet. Still in New Zealand. Today we’re going to do the most recent of the demographics series, specifically focusing on the Middle East. Now, the key thing to remember about the entire swath of territory between roughly Kuwait and Algeria. So that whole stretch – Northeast Africa, all the way into the Persian Gulf region – is that there’s not a lot going on from a moisture point of view. Most of these cultures are centered around oases or narrow river valleys. The Tigris and Euphrates in many places, the entire coastal plain is less than ten miles thick. And the coastal plain in places like Libya look very, very similar. Egypt doesn’t even have water on its coastal plain. It’s just the Nile. So you get these very, very dense population patterns on a very, very concentrated footprint. And the carrying capacity of the land is very, very low. And it wasn’t until the 1900s when you could introduce things like artificial fertilizer that you really got a very dense population even within that zone. So this is an area that was among the last parts of the world to enter the industrial era. And so you had kind of a classic pyramidal formation for the population density until relatively recently in their history.

Okay. Where was I? There are some exceptions. In northern Algeria, you’ve got a much wider coastal plain. So agriculture is more favorable there. Obviously the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia, places that are still desert, but they have irrigation figured the places between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. Obviously going back to antiquity. These have had a lot of people. But the general point when it comes to industrial agriculture stands, you can have a certain concentration and then you just kind of stop to be in the desert, which means that these are some of the last areas in the world to experience industrialization, artificial fertilizers, mechanized agriculture, that sort of thing. And so they don’t, they just have never historically reached the level of population density that you’re able to achieve in, say, the Western world or the East Asian world. Now, what that means is that there’s been a hard population cap on all of these regions up until today, until one thing changed. Oil, whether it’s in Algeria or Libya or Egypt or Iraq or Iran or Saudi Arabia. Once oil became part of the equation, the income potential for these regions expanded by more than an order of magnitude in some cases, almost literally overnight, certainly within a decade. And what that has allowed is these populations to expand beyond the carrying capacity of the land. In the case of Egypt, Cotton contributed well. So these countries could all bring in food and sell the oil to pay for it and then generate a very, very different population matrix.

And we’re back. All right. So what this means is the countries have had it. All these places have a traditional pyramid going back to antiquity and then as we hit industrialization because of oil and the food just kept coming, they were able to maintain very high birth rates. They were no longer doing this with domestic food production, but instead with imported food. So the pyramid has stayed. It’s just gotten broader and broader, broader and broader because most of these countries have food subsidies in order to maintain political tranquility. But when the food is cheap, but you’re not producing it yourself, we get more and more people, but it eventually becomes more and more unstable from a demographic point of view. And now, whether you’re in Algeria or Egypt or Iraq, and especially in places like, say, Lebanon or Libya, you’ve seen the populations increase by a factor of four or five, even six or seven over the time since 1945, while food production has gone stagnate or in many cases like in Egypt, actually gone negative as we switched over to things like citrus and especially cotton. Which means these are the parts of the world that are now most vulnerable to anything that happens with globalization, because if anything impacts their ability to export their non staple food products and import wheat, you get a population crash. It’ll probably be worse in places like Libya, where food production has maybe doubled since 1945, but population has increased by a factor of seven or eight. And in Egypt, where a lot of the wheat has gone away and it’s been replaced with cotton and citrus since a population has boomed. And now, even if they switch all the food production back to wheat, you still would have a 50% shortage. And the ability of local food production in order to support the local population. So these places have seen some of the greatest expansions in population ever in human history and we’re not too far away from them experiencing some  population crashes in human history. What we’re about to see as the global population sinks in is a degree of famine that is absolutely unprecedented and is likely to be even far more extreme than what we’re about to see people in china.

And so remember when you got a pure pyramidal population structure with lots of people under age 40, in that sort of situation, you’re going to have high growth because of the consumption, high inflation because the consumption and not a lot of productive capacity, because you don’t have a lot of skilled workers that are age 40 to 65. You also don’t have a lot of capital. And so these societies had a hard time lifting themselves out of poverty, except when it comes to things like oil sales, which is then usually the province of the state that doesn’t generate the sort of velocity of capital that is necessary for good infrastructure, for good education, and for all the other things that we kind of celebrate as the norm in the first world. It also means that you have a lot of young people who don’t really have a stake in the system because they don’t control the wealth that’s controlled by the sheiks and the princes at the top. So you tend to get very politically unstable systems. And if you add in the coming food crisis, the degree of civil great down that is possible in this, these areas are few. And for those of you who consider yourself students of history, if you look back and the rise and collapsed rise of cloud and the rising collapse of city states and empires throughout this entire region, this is starting to sound a little bit familiar. This may be where humanity got its start, but it’s also capable of some of the most catastrophic civilizational collapses. And we’re going to see that next decade or two.

Oh, yeah. One more thing. On yeah we relocated to Te Anau. I know there is a unique demographic pattern for some countries in the Middle East that is largely based on their intense wealth, because once you get to a certain level of income, you start paying people to do other things. So, for example, if you’re in the United States in your top 1%, you probably have a housekeeper. Well, you carry that into the Middle East where you’ve got this oil and natural gas income and you’re surrounded by places with a pyramidal demographic structure, and you start hiring people to do everything. So it’s not just menial chores or raising the kids. It’s building roads. It’s building bridges, it’s doing your oil infrastructure. You bring in labor for absolutely everything. And so if you look at countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar or especially the United Arab Emirates, you will notice that they have a pyramidal demographic structure. But on the men’s side, between roughly age 15 and 40, there’s a huge bulge that goes out, which is in essence, foreign guest workers who for the most part, unless you’re on that top end, it’s like doing the air traffic control and stuff, basically slave labor.

And in some cases that is not just a significant percentage of the population. In the case of Qatar, that is like half the population for the UAE, almost three quarters. So when you’re looking at the geopolitics of the region, you’re like, Oh, you don’t like the Iranians or We don’t like the Iraqis. Just keep in mind that the countries that the Israelis and the Americans, to a certain degree have identified as potential allies of the future Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE.

You are dealing with slave autocracies. So have fun with that.

Biden’s First Air Strike

In the wee hours of February 26, American military forces in the Middle East carried out a handful of air strikes against Iranian paramilitary forces in Syria. To my knowledge it represents the first such public strike against known Iranian forces in the country in a very long time.
 
It is exceedingly dangerous to opine at length about any military action carried out by an administration as newborn as TeamBiden. The almost-overwhelming urge is to read-in grand-plan ambitions such as attempting to reset relations with Iran, or shape the Israeli-Saudi dynamic, or presage greater involvement in the region as a whole as a prelude to a broadscale geopolitical rewiring. (Many of Biden’s current national security team were with then-Vice President Biden during the Obama Administration, and watched helplessly and hopelessly as President Obama failed to do jack at a time when forthright American action could have generated positive results. There very well could be some now-that-I’m-in-charge-ism going on.)
 
The reality is probably much more prosaic, and probably is much closer to what the Biden administration’s official statement claimed: On Feb 15 a local militia carried out rocket attacks against a U.S. facility in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil. That group was a front for Iranian militias in the region. TeamBiden wants to dissuade future attacks while the White House finishes reviewing options for American policy in Iraq.
 
If the official statement holds true, it’d put the U.S. strike very firmly in the Clintonesque bucket. Bill Clinton wasn’t particularly interested by anything that had to with foreign affairs, but he also wasn’t shy about dispensing moderate levels of military force when his advisors so advised. That isn’t meant as either a lauding or condemnation of the Clinton administration’s Middle East policies, but instead simply a recognition that Clinton was willing to use the various levers of American power in ways neither Obama nor Trump ever did. It’s a fairly traditional view of American power.
 
Now, just because there probably is no grand plan here doesn’t mean that there won’t be many reverberations. After all, it has been 20 years since the United States had a commander in chief that did much of anything against Iranian interests in the region by means of military strikes – W Bush required a degree of Iranian cooperation against al Qaeda and in managing Iraq, Obama was (infamous) for wanting nothing to do with it at all, and Trump opted for a nearly complete hands-off approach with a couple notable exceptions. Intentionally or not this is a signal change that will have consequences.
 
A few thoughts:
 
Turkey: The Turks are absolutely thrilled. Any U.S. policy which involves hurling American ordinance into Syria against anyone except Turkish proxies is one that Ankara can set to music. Turkish-American relations under the past three American presidents have gotten steadily worse to the point that today they are somewhere between cold and nonexistent. It isn’t so much that the Turks want the Americans to be in-region in general, but instead the Turks do appreciate it when the Americans shoot up military factions that the Turks oppose but are too gun-shy to directly go after themselves. The Turkish government was furious with the Obama Administration for threatening to go after the Syrian government but then ultimately backing down. In the Turkish mind Biden is no longer synonymous with his old boss. Down the road, that little reclassification will come in handy for both the Turks and Americans.
 
Israel: The Israeli government loved the Trump Administration’s maximum pressure campaign to isolate Iran, just as much as they hated the Obama Administration’s engagement with Iran. With Biden flinging bombs and looking to enact a far harsher version of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, there now exists the tantalizing possibility of the best of all worlds. Military and economic containment of Iran. I’m sure folks in Jerusalem are smiling thoughtfully at the possibilities.
 
Russia: According to regional press reports the Biden Administration only alerted the Russians of the actions after the munitions were in-flight. America has long opposed the Russian military presence in Syria, but Obama and Trump were simply not invested enough to do anything about it. Anything that raises a hint of Russian military casualties at American hands is something that would make the Russians extraordinary nervous. After all, the Russian deployments to Syria cannot be maintained in the face of Turkish or American military hostility.
 
Iraq: Baghdad hasn’t had much to be happy about for a good long while, existing as it does in a politically fractured, economically devastated, strategic limbo. They’re not happy with Iranian militias, but they’re equally unhappy with American military actions. That this counterstrike occurred in Syria rather than Iraq deflects attention from the Iraqis. It’s a small favor from TeamBiden, but Baghdad will accurately interpret it as a favor nonetheless.
 
Iran: Strategically, the Iranians are in a box. Trump’s maximum pressure campaign had gutted Tehran’s ability to sell crude – and those sales pay for everything that makes Iran Iran, from subsidies to keep its own citizens quiet to the paramilitary forces that comprise the bulk of Iran’s broader Middle Eastern strategy. Iran has run out of expendable forces to deploy in Syria and is now digging deep into its formal army officers. I’d be surprised if the Iranians did not lose someone fairly high-up the chain in today’s U.S. strike.
 
For some time now, Iran has been attempting to generate some leverage to use against the Americans in upcoming talks, but it isn’t going well. Iran hijacked a South Korean products tanker back around New Years, but neither TeamTrump nor TeamBiden has cared enough to do anything (all hail shale-revolution-induced-American-energy-independence!). Iranian proxies in Iraq regularly lob rockets into American green zones. What was different about the Feb 15 attack is they actually killed a civilian contractor (a Philippine national), which led TeamBiden to underline that consequence-free American blam remains just a button-push away.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA

Life After Trump, Part VII: The Crisis List—The Middle East

Read the other installments in this series:
 
Life after Trump, Part I: Living in the Lightning
Life after Trump, Part II: Searching for Truth in a Flood of Freedom
Life After Trump, Part III: The End of the Republican Alliance
Life After Trump, Part IV: Building a Better Democrat…Maybe
Life After Trump, Part V: The Opening Roster
Life After Trump, Part VI: The Crisis List—Russia
Life After Trump, Part VII: The Crisis List—The Middle East
Life After Trump, Part VIII: The Crisis List—China

The second major international issue facing the incoming Joe Biden administration is that never-ending joy, the problem that just keeps on giving: the Middle East.
 
If there is one thing most Americans agree on in this age of social media screaming, it is that they want the United States to get out of the Persian Gulf. The challenge is finding a way to do so that also avoids sucking America back in in a few years.
 
There are two general approaches to consider:
 
The first strategy is the one Biden’s immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, attempted: appoint a strategic successor to manage the region. Trump decided the successor should be Israel. That…that was a poor choice.
 
Is Israel very militarily competent and blam-heavy for its size? Undeniably. But it is neck deep in managing its own micro-neighborhood of the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It cannot execute an American-style policy in the Persian Gulf that keeps the oil flowing while preventing Iraq from collapsing while keeping Iran down.
 
It is clear that at least to a degree TeamTrump grasped that Israel was not up to the task, so the administration worked to rig the game. Trump greatly intensified sanctions on Iran, largely preventing the Iranians from selling…anything internationally. An economic crash resulted. Trump also worked to build a coalition of Arab states to buttress the Israelis. That required Trump convincing the Arabs that they should recognize Israel as something other than the “Zionist entity” and treat it as an actual country that had an actual right to exist.
 
Trump met with some success and deserves some serious diplomatic kudos, but let’s not get crazy. Consider the countries Trump flipped:

  • Morocco – a state that is literally over a continent away from the drama of the Persian Gulf.
  • Bahrain – an island statelet that has run out of oil and has but 1.6 million people.
  • The United Arab Emirates – a confederation of city states who collectively are Iran’s largest (non-oil) trading partner.

A coalition, yes, but not a strategically effective one. Strategically, Trump’s achievements changed little.

The second option for American extraction from the region is the one selected by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama: establish a regional balance of power so the region’s countries contain one another. Israel aside, consider the other major players:

  • Saudi Arabia, as the world’s largest oil exporter and the keeper of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, asserts that it should lead the entire region. That’s an assertion which aggravates everyone, but in particular aggrieves…
  • Iran, the country with the largest population on the Persian Gulf, and whose dominant religion – Shia Islam – clashes with that of the Wahhabi Sunni Islam of the Saudis. Problematic for the Saudis, Shia Islam is practiced by the majority of people who live within 100 miles of the Persian Gulf’s shores. Even Saudi Arabia itself has a large Shia minority.
  • But neither of these countries are the region’s most powerful. That title goes to Turkey, a country which doesn’t even border the Gulf itself. Turkey has the broader region’s largest and most sophisticated economy, largest and most capable military, and a population slightly larger than even Iran.

The whole point of Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal between the United States and Iran was to bring Iran in from the cold, enable it to economically develop, and re-establish Iran as a formal player in the Middle East space. Then, as the logic goes, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran would all counter one another, leaving the Americans to play an eclectic variety of Middle East-news-driven drinking games.

There was nothing wrong with the idea, but there was plenty wrong with the execution. The nuclear deal was (in)famously light on details of anything beyond the nuclear program itself. It didn’t address Iran’s paramilitary and assassination activities throughout the region, the status of Israel, or the religious splits among the region’s populations the Iranians exploited as a matter of course.

Obama (in)famously found speaking with people – any people – tedious, and so tended to toss out grand ideas and then walk away forever. Establishing a regional balance of power in which you do not plan to actively participate requires a lot of upfront work and a lot of lengthy conversations. Under Obama that just didn’t happen. Far from generating a balance of power, the Obama plan was little more than an unstable deal which made an unstable region even more unstable.

My goal here isn’t to condemn the strategies of both Trump and Obama (that’s more of a side bonus), but instead to highlight that the Middle East is difficult. My point is that for the approaches the pair of American presidents chose, they simply did things wrong.

For the successor strategy to work, Trump should have picked a different country. Israel lacks the military capacity to control its own neighborhood, much less the distant Persian Gulf where the populations are four times as large. Saudi Arabia might look good on paper, but it is broadly militarily incompetent. The only regional power that could even theoretically fill the role would have been Turkey, and America’s relationship with the Turks under Trump (and under Obama) descended into such a deep freeze to the point that the two are no longer even functional allies.

For a balance of power strategy to work in the Persian Gulf, it must be like all the other successful balances of power throughout human history. It cannot be purely military. There must be excessive entanglement on multiple fronts. There must be an economic angle. A political angle. A diplomatic angle. For Obama’s strategy to work, any Iran “deal” was really only the first baby step. He would then have had to build relationships among the regional players. That’d require some seriously uncomfortable diplomacy not simply with Iran and Turkey, but also Saudi Arabia and Israel. That would require a lot of political capital and even more face time. Considering how much Obama loathed speaking to people, especially about uncomfortable issues, it’s a minor miracle he made it as far as he did in the region.

So now we get to try this again with a new president: Joe Biden.

Believe it or not, there may be some room for progress – in part because of the efforts of Biden’s predecessors.

As part of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign to crush Iran, the Iranian economy has been absolutely devastated. The Iranians cannot even sell pistachios any longer, to say nothing of large-scale oil sales. With Iran proving to be an unreliable oil supplier, traditional customers like Italy, Greece, India, China, Korea, and Japan have all turned elsewhere for crude. Then COVID reduced global oil demand, crushing Iranian finances. No oil income means the Europeans have zero interest in participating in a revised nuclear deal because there is literally nothing in it for them. No oil income also means Iran has proven unable to sustain many of its paramilitary efforts in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Iran hasn’t been this weak since the rise of the ayatollahs in 1979.

America has changed as well. Politically, there is no longer an American faction pushing for deep regional involvement. While the shale revolution was little more than a glimmer in some oilmen’s eyes when Obama stepped into the White House the first time, twelve years later the United States is functionally energy independent. The energy cord has been cut. The Forever Wars are…over. Both America and Americans can tolerate a far higher degree of chaos in the Persian Gulf than they previously could.

Which means TeamBiden might actually have a third option that hasn’t existed since the early days of American involvement in the region in the 1950s. To simply leave.

America will still play at the margins. Just because the United States doesn’t need a stable global oil market doesn’t mean having a knife to the region’s pulse isn’t useful. So, Biden has already announced it is maintaining every speck of the sanctions Trump enacted. If there is to be a new deal, TeamBiden has made it clear they won’t be following the Obama script because Biden’s negotiating power is already far superior to that of any of his predecessors. Nor is Biden playing favorites like Trump did; the new president has already cancelled advanced weapons sales to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (two states that were supposed to be at the core of Trump’s Israel-coalition).

Consider what this means: The Israelis are appalled Biden is even talking about talking to the Iranians. The Iranians are appalled that Trump’s exit hasn’t ushered them back into the world. The Saudis are appalled they can’t purchase weapons. Just a couple weeks on the job Biden has done something none of his predecessors would have dared: pissed off everyone in the entire region. It’s unclear if this general pissing-off effort is part of a broader plan, or nothing more than a series of tactical decisions TeamBiden believes are unrelated. It is also unclear whether it matters. And if it does matter, it’s unclear if the administration even cares.

Will that have consequences down the road? Certainly. But not for the United States, or at least not for the United States on anything less than a decade time scale. The global superpower has barely been able to keep the region’s many fires on smolder. No one else has within an order of magnitude the necessary power or reach to step in, suggesting flare ups will be the new norm. Fires in the part of the world responsible for the majority of globally traded crude oil will absolutely reverberate.

And for the world’s most vulnerable country, it just adds one more mortal threat to the cavalcade of crises that were already barreling down.

It’s time to talk about China.

Coming soon:
Life After Trump, Part VIII: The Crisis List – China

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA

Video Dispatch IV: America’s Mid-East Partners in Disarray

The pullout of US troops in the Middle East is likely to continue after November’s presidential election. We’re already seeing significant changes in how the Middle East works, including what sorts of antics local players can get into when the US is distracted. And for once, Iran isn’t at top of mind. Iran is a known quantity at this point, making whatever moves it can from a very constrained set of options that it has been relying on since 1979. Rather, it’s the Saudis, the Turks, and everyone else who has been wholly dependent on American protection since the end of the Cold War (if not World War II!).   

NB: at 1:46 I definitely meant to say *Turkey.*

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA

Waking Up to Reality in the Middle East

Thursday, August 13 the Trump administration released a series of breathless communiques proclaiming the onset of formal peace and diplomatic recognition between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Shortly thereafter the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed the American releases in both substance and theme. The Emirati leader, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, was far less…gushy in his own announcement, but critically contradicted nothing stated by Trump or Netanyahu.
 
Waitaminute! Don’t the Arabs hate Israel? Why in the world would a rich Arab statelet on the far side of the Arabian Peninsula want to exchange ambassadors with the Zionists??
 
It isn’t so much that the Emiratis don’t care about the Palestinians any longer (although they really, really don’t), and instead it is bound up with the rapidly simplifying American position in the Middle East. The Americans have nearly completed their pullout from the overall region, and the Emiratis are hoping to get ahead of their rapidly disintegrating geopolitical environment.
 
In the aftermath of World War II, the Americans crafted the global Order to bribe up an alliance to fight the Soviets. Part of that was funding rebuilding, financing the construction of industrial plant, and enabling the Europeans and East Asians to access the American consumer market. All that required oil, and that oil for the most part came from the Middle East. And so, the Americans went to the Middle East.
 
We are now thirty years after the Soviet collapse. Americans are done managing the world, and the Americans are especially done managing the Middle East. They’re going home. Troop rotations have outnumbered permanent deployments in-region for years. The Iraqi deployment is quickly approaching zero. The Syrian deployment is no longer more than a rounding error. Only Afghanistan remains as a meaningful deployment, and it is a deployment few Americans want to continue. The naval base in Bahrain and CENTCOM’s operations center in Qatar only continue existing to service the Afghan deployment. And that’s…all of it.
 
From the United Arab Emirates’ point of view this is an unmitigated disaster. The UAE (and  their fellow Gulf states of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain and Qatar) don’t care what US troops do in the Middle East or how many locals they kill or how many US troops die at the locals’ hands. They simply want the Americans present – both regionally and around the world. So long as the global superpower is active, the Gulfies don’t have to worry about guarding the production, processing, and exporting infrastructure for their oil and natural gas. So long as the Americans are globally engaged and guaranteeing freedom of the seas for all, the Gulfies know their hydrocarbon exports will safely arrive at their customers’ ports. National safety and national bank. For them, it’s that simple.
 
Those heady days are over. America’s withdrawal from the wider world has been a longer running development than its Middle Eastern wrap-ups. It, too, is now multiple presidential administrations underway. Total US force deployments globally are at the lowest level since before the Great Depression, and still trending down.
 
For the Emiratis in specific and the Gulfies in general, the Americans’ past-the-point-of-no-return departure conjures up multiple, reinforcing disasters.
 
1: Iran
 
Unlike many who have a finger in the world of national security, I’ve never found Iran to be strategically threatening.
 
Iran’s army is designed to oppress its own population, not march on its neighbors. Its air force hasn’t been updated since the fall of the shah in 1979, and the Iranians are running out of jets to fall out of the sky. It’s navy…well, it doesn’t have a navy. It has a bunch of speedboats. Should Iran march on the Gulf states, it would face four challenges:
 
First, its army would have to march. It isn’t motorized. Second, it would have to first march through its own region of Khuzestan – a region populated by restive minorities. Third, it would have to cross a pontoon bridge into Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city. A high-school science experiment could take out the bridge, while needing to pacify Basra’s two-million-strong population at the beginning of an invasion’s supply line would about as much fun for the Iranians as it was for the Americans when they conquered/liberated Iraq in 2003. Finally, there’s a blistering six hundred miles of completely empty desert between the Kuwaiti border and any meaningful infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. That’s a loooooong walk.
 
Yet as unimpressed as I am by the Iranian military, it is the freakin’ Roman Legion compared to the militaries of the Gulf states. The Gulfies are beyond military incompetent because they’ve never had to be competent. Sure, the Emiratis and Saudis are getting some good target practice for their air forces in Yemen, but their armies are largely paperweights and none of them have a navy that’s more than a coast guard. Not only have all depended upon the Americans to do their fighting for them, most consider a functional domestic military a potential threat to the ruling dynasties.
 
2: Their own populations
 
All the Gulfies ship in vast swathes of workers, to the point that over 70% of the “populations” of Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE are imported labor. This isn’t like Western Europe or the United States where the migrants do jobs the locals don’t want. In the Gulf states, the migrants do everything. The migrants are not allowed to bring their families or own property, and as soon as the migrant men lose the ability to carry their own weight or the women lose their looks, they are rooted out and sent packing. They are regularly the target of every assault imaginable, including sexual assault.
 
In the United states, we have a word for that: slavery.
 
Treat this many people this badly, and only the existence of a wildly intrusive and brutal and unfettered internal security service can maintain domestic control for the ruling dynasties. As much of a threat as Iran is, the day-to-day internal pressures of the Gulf states are far more likely to end them.
 
Many make light of the fact that the actual citizens of the Gulf states could be a risk as well. After all, they are used to cradle-to-grave support for everything from food to rent to hookah bars. The idea being, that should social spending falter, the locals might rise up against their rulers.
 
While I don’t quite dismiss this concern out of hand, I’m not all that worried. The Gulf states in general – and the UAE in particular – have addressed this problem by helping their peoples consume as many saturated fats as possible to make them as unhealthy as possible. The idea being that overweight people laden with heart disease who can only get around on scooters aren’t the type to leave their air-conditioned compounds to riot in the desert sun. Pampered corpulence as a national security strategy might sound odd, but it works for the most part. Therefore, I am – and the local governments are – more watchful of the larger, younger, healthier, angrier and institutionally abused slave class.
 
The only way this system is sustainable is if the money from hydrocarbon sales keeps flowing in and whoever guarantees Gulf state security turns a blind eye. The Americans are leaving, endangering both the income flows and the political cover.
 
3: Outside expeditionary powers
 
Key thing to keep in mind when considering the United States in the Middle East: the US was primarily interested in Middle East oil for its alliance network, not for itself. Historically, the United States has gotten nearly all its crude from its own territories or its North American neighbors, plus Venezuela. With America’s shale revolution now mid-way through its second decade, technically, it is already independent. Its need for Middle Eastern oil has gone from minor to nearly nonexistent.
 
Not so for…pretty much anyone else. Despite all the Green rhetoric on wind, solar and the like, combined they still generate only about 2% of the world’s total energy needs. Oil and natural gas clock in at more than half. And for most of the world, it must be imported. From the Persian Gulf.
 
Outside powers who have been dependent upon the Americans to maintain energy flows can do the math. Outside powers who have navies can do it faster. The first time there’s a real energy crisis anywhere in the world after the Americans have left the Middle East, we’re going to see some records broken for sailing times from the United Kingdom, France, India and Japan to the Persian Gulf.
 
Note: China can only play in the Persian Gulf if the United States makes the Pacific and Indian Oceans safe operating zones for the Chinese navy. The Chinese navy only has a handful of ships that can sail beyond the First Island Chain. The operative word is “sail”. It is almost certain they cannot fight their way much past the Chain, much less operate five thousand miles beyond it in the Middle East. China simply is not an expeditionary power, and is a non-power in the Persian Gulf.
 
The Gulfies might not like the Americans very much, but the Americans have had a vested interest in the Gulf states remaining independent and making boatloads of money by selling their hydrocarbons. For the locals it was a sweet deal. Any post-American power that comes to the Gulf is unlikely to be nearly as…understanding.

So, what does this all have to do with a normalization of relations deal between the UAE and Israel. Simply put, the Emiratis (really, all the Gulfies) know the Americans are leaving and they are massively – hysterically – unable to look out for their own interests in the world that’s coming. Between the threats of Iran, their own populations and extra-regional powers, none of them are long for this world.

Unless they can get some help. They need someone who can help them resist Iran. They need someone who can help them infiltrate and purge undesirable elements from their own populations. They need someone who can help them stand up to far outsiders.

Banding together is off the table. As much as the Gulf states dislike Iran, they like one another even less. These are not countries. They are dynasties. It is as if each of the Kardashian sisters ran her own kingdom. (The GCC – for those of you who follow the region enough to know what that is – is nothing more than the Saudi attempt to force everyone to do things their way.). The Gulfies trust – they all trust – Israel more than one another.

To call Thursday’s agreement a peace deal is a rhetorical flourish. A bit of PR flim-flamery. The UAE and Israel were not at war. Israeli military planners didn’t lose much sleep thinking about Emirati-backed militant cells in Palestine or Syria or Lebanon targeting their populations, much less a conventional Emirati military attack. Thursday’s announcement was more about a public acknowledgement of cold, hard, geopolitical reality: the issue isn’t an Israel-Arab divide being healed, much less one of Jewish-Islamic ecumenical healing. The difference hasn’t been that broad is decades.

Rather, it is about an American security dependent heeding the writing on the wall. Of wanting to (of having to) protect their interests (their existence) without the promise (or hope) of American intervention. The Emiratis are worried about Tehran. About Tokyo. About Paris. About New Delhi. About London. (About Riyadh.)

They should be.

The real kicker? This diplomatic normalization is only the first step. In time the UAE – indeed, each of the Gulf states – will need to partner with an outside power if they are to survive the predations of the others. Kudos to the Emiratis for the first-mover advantage. They’ve not only gained themselves a diplomatic, political, intelligence and military partner, they’ve broken the ice and made it a bit easier to stomach partnering with a true infidel.

Time will tell if it is enough.

If you enjoy our free newsletters, the team at Zeihan on Geopolitics asks you to consider donating to Feeding America.

The economic lockdowns in the wake of COVID-19 left many without jobs and additional tens of millions of people, including children, without reliable food. Feeding America works with food manufacturers and suppliers to provide meals for those in need and provides direct support to America’s food banks.

Food pantries are facing declining donations from grocery stores with stretched supply chains. At the same time, they are doing what they can to quickly scale their operations to meet demand. But they need donations – they need cash – to do so now.

Feeding America is a great way to help in difficult times.

The team at Zeihan on Geopolitics thanks you and hopes you continue to enjoy our work.

DONATE TO FEEDING AMERICA