Relocate or Move On from the Middle East

Raised Relief Map View of the Middle East | Licensed by Envato Elements

Following the dumpster fire that was the Iran war, the U.S. is contemplating how and where to redeploy forces to the Middle East.

Iran has demonstrated an increasingly capable drone arsenal, striking U.S. facilities across the region. So, can the U.S. just plop a couple bases in Jordan or Israel’s Negev Desert and call it a day?

Not exactly. The U.S. relies on the Patriot systems to shoot down Iranian drones, but there’s a scale problem. Iran can pump out thousands of drones in the time it takes the U.S. to make a dozen or so Patriots. That means that without creating a new interceptor, the U.S. is only buying itself a little time by moving its bases further away; eventually, even these new bases will fall within Iran’s range.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Banff, Canada in Alberta. Today we’re going to talk about the American in progress plans to redeploy its forces throughout the Middle East. One of the many things that we saw as a result of the Iran war is that the Iranians now have a limited number of precision weapons. As we’ve been watching the Ukraine war, we’ve seen the accuracy in the reach of drone warfare extending incrementally ever since February, which is the same window that the Iran war happened in. And what we now have are a new type of drone that I call memory drones, where you can program in a limited decision tree, and when the drone gets to the general vicinity of its target, the pilot releases it and the drone looks at its targeting criteria, selects a target itself, and then goes in. And since the decision was made on board, it can’t be jammed at that point. It can only be shot down. And most of the damage that we have seen to U.S. military facilities in places like Kuwait and the UAE and Saudi Arabia were by these drones. And it’s not just that they hit the United States. They hit with extreme precision hitting, whether it was a barracks or a radar dome. 

Anyway, bottom line is that the United States lacks a good defense for these systems. The Patriots are absolutely the preeminent system that the Americans have for shooting down those drones, and they’ll definitely do that. But the United States can only build about a dozen of those things a week. Whereas the Iranians can assemble several thousand drones per week. The math was always going to be against the US’s favor. So the discussion now is to where to move these facilities and the two countries that keep coming up over and over and over again are Jordan and Israel, where you’d probably put them in the Negev desert. And the theory is, you would put them outside of Iran’s range. 

But no, there are multiple versions of the drones that the Iranians are using. But what we’ve seen in the Ukraine war is that the range gets incrementally longer every single day. The Ukrainians are now regularly striking targets that are over a thousand miles away from the Ukrainian space. And in the case of Iran, they’re nowhere near that long. But they’ve certainly breached 600. And 600 miles range can bring those Iranian drones all the way to the Mediterranean, hit anywhere in Israel already. So if the American goal is to have a close in military facility in the Persian Gulf region or the Middle East in general that can threaten Iran. The interceptor problem has to be solved. It isn’t an issue of distance. Iran has already demonstrated has robust capability of hitting anything in the region all the way to Israel, all the way to the Red sea, all the way to Yemen. Moving the bases isn’t going to change anything, except for maybe buy just a few months while the Iranians tick up their drone range just a little bit. And that’s all it would take, just a little bit. So no, this isn’t a good solution. So we’re probably going to be seeing a broad scale American withdrawal from the region unless and until the interceptor problem can be solved. And it will not be solved with Patriots.

A Post-American Alliance for the Middle East

Map of the Middle East

Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia are entertaining a NATO-style mutual defense pact. While this alliance might not be practical at this moment, it’s a much different conversation in the long run.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. It is the 10th of August. And the new news is that over the weekend, representatives of Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia met in Mecca and basically tried to build the local equivalent of NATO, complete with a joint defense clause where an attack on one of them is an attack on all of them. 

Obviously, Iran is the boogeyman in the room at the moment. So let’s talk about how this at this moment in time, is kind of silly, but if you look forward a few years actually makes a lot of sense. So first the silly. Saudi Arabia obviously has been heavily involved in the war with Iran and has had any number of his physical assets for oil production, transport and refining attacked. And it’s been partially flanked by the Houthis, which are basically an Iranian proxy. So there is no part of Saudi Arabia that is safe from the drone and missile attacks the Iranians have been lobbying these last six. The idea that they would want a security pact with a country that’s not the United States makes a lot of sense, because the United States started this war, prosecuted this war without any consultation with the Saudis, and now looks to be getting bored with the war and is likely to just leave. And Saudi Arabia has to figure out how to live with that. 

On the other hand, you’ve got Pakistan and Turkey, which, while they don’t necessarily have friendly relations with Iran all the time. They don’t consider it a hostile state in the traditional sense. Yes, they’ve got some security issues. There are ethnic Kurds living in the border region between Turkey and Iran, and both sides try to stir up problems for the other one on the other side of the border. And the Baluchis are the problem on the border between Iran and Pakistan and basically the same math flows. But Iran and Pakistan don’t nearly have the kind of death grip on relations that the Saudis have. And anything from the Iranian point of view that gets anyone else collaborating with or with the United States is generally not a good thing.  

The Iranians are a lot like the Russians, in that they may have a lot of power, but they’re certainly not able to dictate a solution. So keeping everybody else broken up makes sense. And this agreement certainly doesn’t work for that. But keep in mind that the other countries have other things going on that the others want nothing to do with. 

So Iran is the issue of the moment. But, you know, if you’re in Pakistan, your only issue that matters is India and the Turks and the Saudis want nothing to do with a fight with India. And if you’re in Turkey, you’re either wrestling diplomatically and economically in culture with the Europeans or you’re getting ready for a fight with the Russians. And that is something the Saudis and the Pakistanis want nothing to do with either. So at this moment in history, the idea that this is a tripartite alliance where one of them will bleed for the other two is honestly kind of silly. And the Iranians have already kind of called it that. But if you step back a little bit and take the longer view, the picture changes. 

Regardless of why the United States is removing itself from a lot of the Eastern Hemisphere. You can make the argument that I’ve been making for some time that for reasons of demographics and geopolitics, the U.S. is entering a more retrenched phase. You can look at what the Trump administration has done is basically spent most of our long range weapons making it almost impossible for us to fight a real war in the Eastern Hemisphere now. 

Regardless of the cause, the United States’ position is the determinant of what happens in the Persian Gulf, is fading very, very rapidly and will probably collapse before the end of this administration, if not the end of this year. That reorders everything. One of the big things that people have forgotten about when they talk about globalization is it allows any local power to project economic and cultural influence on a global basis. 

And if you’re a non minor power, like, say, Turkey or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, that can have an outsized impact on everything. But if you remove the United States in its security guarantor position and its ability to keep the sea lanes safe for everybody, all of a sudden all of these secondary powers have to take care of their own neighborhood. And that forces a reshuffling of priorities domestically and internationally. And so if you look at these three countries, all three of them are Sunni. So there’s that’s a religious extraction of Islam. So there’s already a degree of a cultural link. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest oil exporter. Turkey and Pakistan are importers. And if you look at the other places where these places might get their energy from, Pakistan might be able to get some from Southeast Asia. But in a deglobalizing world almost all of that crude can be consumed locally. The Turks can get crude from, say, Turkey. But as the Ukraine war continues to heat up in a globalized world, it’s only going to get hotter. All of a sudden that becomes less viable to. 

So these three countries in the mid-term are going to be seeing closer and closer security and economic integration anyway. And the idea that today they are laying the groundwork for something that might actually resemble an alliance down the line. Well, we’re now going from pie in the sky to kind of common sense. It won’t work this year, probably won’t work next year, but by the time we get to 2030, we’re going to be in a very different environment, both in the Middle East specifically and in the wider world. And it’s interesting to see countries that have capability, like Pakistan, like Turkey, largest army and NATO like Saudi Arabia, already starting to prepare for a postAmerican world.

The Future of Drone Tech: Israel’s Iron Dome

Photo of Iron Dome missile defense system firing

Fiber-optic-controlled first-person drones are the star of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. As Hezbollah deploys more of these drones, holes in Israel’s Iron Dome defense network are beginning to appear.

Iron Dome was designed to intercept rockets and missiles traveling in visible ballistic arcs. These drones use completely different attack approaches; they fly low and are connected via fiber-optic cables, so jamming won’t work either. You couple that with widely available components, and it becomes clear that Israel can’t defend against these drones on its own.

The other major player in drone-tech and defense is Ukraine, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw closer cooperation between these two countries soon. We’ll continue this discussion on the future of drone tech tomorrow.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Saint Peter’s. Feels weird to do a video in here. So we’re just going to do the opener. I’m obviously in Vatican City, and today we’re going to talk about some new things in the world of military technology. All right. Continuing. Oh yeah Swiss Guard back there. Anyway, the news is over the course of the last month, we’ve seen some significant shifts in terms of the technologies used in the Lebanon War. 

Now, for those of you who have forgotten, Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon at the same time that the Iraq war started with the airstrikes by Israel and the United States against Iran. And it’s been continuing, it’s turned into a long term occupation, with the Israelis indicating they really never planned to leave at all anyway. What’s changed in the last few weeks is that we’ve started to see first person drone. 

This place is pretty cool. We’ve seen first person drone attacks. Now those are the ones where you have a pilot with a unit who’s controlling a specific drone, and they’ve got a live telemetry feed that allows them to make decisions in real time. The drone itself has no intelligence or strike capability independent of the pilot. What’s unique about what we’ve seen recently is that we’ve seen now at least a dozen situations where Hezbollah has used these first person drones, but has used them with fiber optic cables, with at least one of them confirmed it would be at least ten kilometers long. 

So with some hints indicating there’s been a couple with fiber optic cables that are about 20km long. Now, a few things to keep in mind about this. Number one, Israel arguably has the absolute best theater missile defense in the world with its Iron Dome system. And lots of folks think that the United States should at least partially copy it. 

And there’s something to be said for that. But keep in mind that Israel is a very small place. So the missile defense you’re going to do in a place like Israel is very different for what you do in the United States. Second, the nature of Iron Dome is primarily designed to intercept short term rockets and maybe some short to mid-term missiles. 

Every time Israel comes under attack, you get some really dramatic visuals, different kind from here, where you can see ballistic arcs that are pretty clean on one side of the photo, and on the other side, you’ll have a swirl of intersecting and spiraling threads, and then they meet. The swirling and intersecting ones are the Iron Dome system. Basically, they fire interceptors into the air. 

They don’t know how many things are going to come in, and then the interceptors lock on to those ballistic arcs and take them out. That really doesn’t work for low level drones at all, because you’ve got a fiber optic around this just flying a few feet to, or maybe a few hundred feet off the ground. They don’t get high enough to be registered by radar, even if they had the components to be detected by a radar. 

A lot of these things are plastic or carbon fiber. That’s real problem, because it means that the entire Iron Dome system has been designed now for a weapon system that is starting to be used against Israel, and there’s very little of the technology that goes into these things that is restricted at all when it comes to suppliers. You really have to. 

You then have the Russians who have contacts with militant groups throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah is no exception. And when you come to the fiber optic spooling, most of that is made in China. So we’re having this really fun intersection of technical overlap, skill overlap, and increasingly geopolitical overlap among countries and forces that have been general been anti a lot of things American for a very, very, very long time. 

There’s not a lot that Israel can do in the short term to counter the sort of activity. Their radars and their interceptors right now are woefully ill designed to deal with this sort of threat. And because of the fiber optics, jamming doesn’t work either. So really, all you can do is kinetic intervention. And at the moment, the Israelis don’t have enough skills in that set to make a meaningful difference. 

The one exception, the one thing that might be coming, is partnership with Ukrainians, who have been developing a lot of models to intercept exactly this sort of drone and have had a fair amount of success. But that also means stationing things at dozens, hundreds of points in order to get it wherever it happens to be launched from. So it’s changing the nature of what it means for Israel to be in a war. 

And it’s dramatically shifting the power balance between the Israeli military, which is one of the best in the world, and Hezbollah, which we thought had largely been shattered as of just a year ago. One more thing. A high end fiber optic spool that a drone can carry today has a range of up to 50km. So with something half that just a mid-range quality, somebody launching a drone from the Hezbollah Lebanese side of the Israeli Lebanon border could strike anywhere in Haifa and with a significant margin. 

So you can go after anything you can see can’t be jammed with a that’s physical infrastructure, vehicles, soldiers or the components that allow the Iron Dome to do Iron Dome things. So big game changer. All right. That’s it by.

How to Break Iran

A ripped grungy back wall of the Iranian flag

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

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

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

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aluminum Shortages Coming Soon

A rock of aluminum

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

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

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

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Fertilizer Falls, Famine Will Follow

A machine fertilizing crops

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

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

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

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iraq, Oil, and a Break for Chevron

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

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

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

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

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qatar Bribes Its Way into Idaho

Flag of Qatar

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

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

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

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody Wants to Bomb Qatar

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

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

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

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

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

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

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

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

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

Probably. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syria and the Return of the March

Woman holding a Syrian flag over a vehicle

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

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

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

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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