A New American Imperialism?

American imperialism is not the same as European imperialism. The Europeans wanted power, prestige and economic gain, while the US was in it for security. So, what will this look like for the Americans moving forward?

With current strategic holdings in places like Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa, further expansion in Asia is more of a nice-to-have, than a need-to-do. Should the US want to make some moves, here are some of the places and considerations that would be involved.

Places like Sao Tomé and Principe, the Azores, and Canaries have some nice positioning for Africa, and Socotra could be valuable for Middle Eastern operations. Then there are some places that bring in another layer of risk, but offer some big incentives – Panama for the canal, Greenland for strategic positioning, or Iceland for importance in the North Atlantic. Cuba and Singapore are interesting, but more complicated. There’s some obvious history with Cuba that makes involvement spooky, but having a foothold would make national defense downright breezy. Tampering with the very solid security partnership with Singapore seems too risky, but having a firmer foot in Southeast Asia could be important in a deglobalizing world.

Yet to existing cooperative security arrangements, the US already enjoys the benefits of influence in almost all of these places without the need for boots on the ground, much less the grinding migraines that come from actual occupations. Expanding into new territories would require managing populations and infrastructure, which could weaken US strategic stability and risk turning allies hostile. What I’m getting at here is if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

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Transcript

Hey everyone, Peter Zeihan coming to you from the Bay of Islands and everyone is talking about conquering countries all of a sudden. So I figured it’d be a good point to review American imperialism. And if there were to be a new chapter of the United States going at and grabbing territories, what sort of territories would we be interested in? 

Key thing to keep in mind. Imperialism. American style is not like imperialism. European style. The Europeans are relatively small countries compared to the United States, whereas the United States has a continental landmass that has some of the best lands in the world. So for the Brits and the French and the Germans and everybody else going out to grab a chunk of territory in order to Improve their own economic prospects. That makes a certain amount of logical sense. For the United States, it never really has. When we were going through reconstruction industrialization, we were still processing the best parts of one of the largest continents in the world. And now that we have a heavily driven services economy that is the most productive on the planet, it’s really hard to imagine the United States going out and occupying a piece of land in order to get X, resource or a trade route. 

Instead, when the United States thinks about imperialism, it’s about not about the money. It’s about security. So we’re not French. We’re not after just to get a big chunk of land that looks good on the globe map. And we are not British, where we’re looking to go out and grab economic nodes that we can then profit from. 

We’re looking for small chunks of very easily defendable land with low populations that don’t generate security heartburn, but instead provide strategic opportunities or limit the strategic opportunities of our foes. And that is a very short list of countries, especially when you consider places that the U.S. already controls. So, for example, if you’re in the Pacific, you look at places like the Northern Mariana Islands, which are not too far from Japan or Guam, which is not too far from the first island chain or American Samoa in the South Pacific. 

These are chunks of territory that the United States gained from the last round of expansion in World War Two, and before that, in the age of imperialism, the 1800s. And there’s really nothing else in that area that we need. We already have what we need. If you’re going to look at, further west, there are a few chunks of territory that I would find strategically interesting. 

The most complicated of them would be a place called Sao Tomé and Principe, which is a small African island nation in the Gulf of Guinea off the south. You know. Well, you know, you know, how Africa just kind of does that thing. It’s it’s in that part in the middle or that’s West or Southwest. I don’t know. 

Anyway, you’re talking about a country with a population of 200,000 or, you know, if you go for, just for principle, a country with just a population of about 10,000, that is something that kind of fits the bill, would allow you to project power in the entire belt of territory from South Africa to Nigeria, to Senegal, with having a very small defense platform. 

Even better would be territories like the Canaries or the Azores, which allow the United States to block potential foes from coming in from the eastern hemisphere of the Western Hemisphere and project power to Europe as well. Now, if those last to the Azores and the Canary sound familiar, it’s because we’ve already seized us at one point during World War Two, and we gave them back because the countries who control those are Portugal and Spain, who are NATO allies. 

One of the things that the United States, excels at is convincing someone that we’re an ally and we take care of all the naval power issues, so you don’t have to worry about it because it’s expensive. If in exchange, you give us security, supremacy and specific footprints of land, that is absolutely our deal with the British when it comes to Diego Garcia, which is our preferred platform in the western Indian Ocean. 

So American imperialism isn’t like classic imperialism in many ways. We don’t even change the nameplate on the chunk of territory, so long as we can have physical access to it. So these are all the things that the United States, for the most part, already has, whatever access it needs. And so there’s no need to go out and physically grab the territory. 

The exception would be Sao Tome and Principe. Only reason you would do that is if you decide you really want to be a major power in Africa on a day in, day out basis. No American administration has made that decision yet. So, you know, we haven’t really gone for it. Let’s say you wanted to step it up and loosen your definition of what’s a good idea, and go after territory that, still has good security parameters for projection, but it’s going to be a lot heavier. 

Carry, in terms of running it, because it either has a larger population or it has land borders. You’ll notice that everything that I’ve laid out so far is an island. And you’re really willing to put your back into a security based empire in a semi-classical sense. This is where Donald Trump has plucked Panama and Greenland. 

Panama has a country, has a population of over 4 million. And one of the biggest drug problems and human smuggling problems in the world. So if we were to go into Panama just for the canal, we would very rapidly get caught up administrating a place. It’s kind of a basket case. And you would only do that if you felt that the canal was that important. 

Keep in mind, the United States already has unrestricted access to canal, and while we do have to pay for transit because we are not paying for upkeep, that also means that whenever the US military wants to go through, everyone else gets shoved to the back of the line. I’d argue got a pretty good deal there already. 

 Second one, Greenland is, of course, all in the news these days. Trump is wanting to buy Greenland for quite some time. And yes, while you can project power from Greenland, no argument there. And we use it for space tracking. And yes, it has a population under 100,000 people. 

It’s a huge chunk of territory, and the people who live there are extremely poor. And if the United States were to take it over, we would then be responsible for the entire territory. One of the beautiful things we have about the make up right now is that Denmark is one of our fastest allies when it comes to doing things in Greenland, they have never once said no. And when it comes to doing things in the Baltic Sea, in the North Sea, which are an order of magnitude more important, they have never said no. 

So if we were to go in and snag Greenland, obviously we could do it if we wanted to. It might cost us, one of our strongest and most loyal allies in one of the most sensitive parts in the world. Moving forward. I would say that that’s not the best plan. Iceland kind of falls into the same category. 

Population of under million dominates the North Atlantic. It’s an independent country. But if you wanted to project power into the Russian sphere, it is a fantastic platform, especially in collaboration with the United Kingdom. But we already do that. And the Icelanders take care of their own business, and they have decided publicly to never field a military. 

They will just let the United States do it. But the cost for that is the United States is allowed to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. So we get all the benefits of occupying the territory without actually having to pay for occupying the territory. 

The final two that might meet this criteria are a pair of countries Singapore and Cuba. Singapore dominates the Strait of Malacca, and any American military presence there would allow us to empower or destroy any country, depending on that route for trade. And that could be Russia. That could be Iran, that could be Saudi Arabia, that could be China. 

So, you know, that could be handy. And, Cuba, because it dominates the interest of the Gulf of Mexico, is a very, near and dear issue to American strategic thinkers because without it, it’s very difficult to do any sort of maritime shipping between the Gulf Coast and the East Coast. And as we found out during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if the Cubans were to host some, intermediate range weapons systems, that would be a real problem for us as well. 

But but in both of these cases, you know, these are big countries. Cuba has this many people. Where Singapore is about 5 million. Singapore is one of the most advanced countries on the planet. And Singapore has kind of made a deal with us, very similar to, say, Denmark. So the United States actually has a dedicated aircraft carrier berth in Singapore that the Singaporeans built. And whenever we’ve had a security issue going back to the time of the Vietnam War. The Singaporeans have always been extraordinarily helpful. 

So you get all the benefits of having the military footprint, but none of the costs of running or administering or occupying a country. Cuba. More problematic, of course, because of politics. If we were actually going to invade a country and occupy it with the intent of making it ours, I would say Cuba would be at the very top of that list. 

But we’ve tried that before in the 60s. It wasn’t a lot of fun. We controlled this territory through most of the time between the Spanish-American War and then, we’re basically ran it as a colony, generated gobs of bad will. And we discovered it’s just easier to base things out of the continental, the United States or Puerto Rico, rather than deal with a population that is pathologically hostile to you. 

So as long as in strategic issues, Cuba is neutered, we really don’t have a problem with it. And ever since, Castro died a few years ago, the Cuban government, while they’ve been prickly, has gone out of the way to make sure that we don’t think that they’re getting in bed with anyone we really don’t like in any ways we really don’t like. 

So they don’t provoke an invasion. So where do we go? You know, I would argue that the United States right now, from a security point of view, has all the benefits of a globe spanning empire, but without actually having to pay for it. If we actually go and start taking over territories, that changes. You have to occupy populations. 

You have to build infrastructure. The way we have it right now is most of these countries want to preserve their independence, and they feel that the best way to do that is to have a differential relationship with the United States security establishment going out there and taking the territory. Turns that on its head. You don’t just lose allies, the places that you are already projecting power from suddenly turn hostile on the inside. 

And that is how empires ultimately fall apart. 

Oh one more off Africa. And again, we would only do this if we felt that we really need to project power into Africa. There was an island called Socotra. It’s Yemenis. It’s off the Horn of Africa. A small little place. Easy enough to build the infrastructure if you wanted to project power into the Persian Gulf. As well as the Red sea in the entire east coast of the African continent.

Trump’s New Grand Strategy

President Trump suggested that Europe should buy US oil and gas to address trade deficits and strengthen alliances. I have a few qualms with this.

Trump talks a big game, but backing it up is a whole different story (meaning I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath while we wait and see if this comes to fruition). That’s not my only concern here though. Europe is facing a whole lot of issues, and prioritizing energy exports to a struggling region isn’t in the best interest of the US.

Instead, America’s energy resources should be allocated to emerging economies in regions that the US could use as strategic footholds and partners down the road. I’m talking Southeast Asia rather than Europe. Carefully selecting allies as the world deglobalizes is going to be very important…so, let’s hope Trump can do more than Tweet about all this.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from. Okay. Who are okay. Who are. Yeah, I think that’s it. On the Cape Brett track in Northland, New Zealand. Today we’re going to do a, something I’m not going to get in the habit of and commenting. And one of Trump’s threats, specifically says that the Europeans should purchase American oil and gas, in order to address their trade deficit, in order to cement the alliance. 

Normally, I’m not going to do this because Trump says a lot of stuff, that usually just doesn’t survive the room. And he is packing his cabinet with functional incompetence. So the chances of any of his policies actually making it into, reality, whether it’s domestic, foreign, are pretty low. And this is no exception to that. 

But, it’s an interesting hypothetical exercise to, think about because we are in a period where the world is reshaping and seemingly incoherent. Things like this actually could have an impact. So, the volume first, Europe. And I’m using Europe in the broadest sense. It includes the Balkans, includes Switzerland, includes the United Kingdom, as well as all of the European Union. 

They use about 13 million barrels of crude a day. If you include refined product, as well as about 45,000,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas a day. And that’s roughly 50 to 60% of what the United States uses. They have more people than the United States has, significantly more. But their economy is smaller and it’s less energy intensive because they don’t have a lot of manufacturing. 

And while the United States has been gone, going through this big Three industrialization boom, much of Europe is actually industrializing because they’re running out of energy because they’re under net of workers, because they’re running out of finance. It’s a demographic story as much as anything else. Anyway. If if, if the United States did decide that it wanted to fuel Europe, it would need to expand its oil production by like 2 or 3, 4 barrels a day, which is probably going to happen in the next five years anyway. 

And for natural gas, we need to build out significant, LNG, liquefied natural gas export capacity. We have to double, almost triple what we have right now. And there are enough projects in the pipeline for that to happen over the next decade. So from a numbers point of view, it’s not a ridiculous idea. It would mean not sending product anywhere else. 

And so problem number one with this plan is right now our number one energy destination for energy exports is Mexico. And without those exports, the lights go off. In Mexico, roughly half of Mexican electricity, for example, is generated by the use of American natural gas. And we send them over a million barrels a day of crude and refined product as well. 

 And that’s built into our manufacturing system. So if we were to send that somewhere else for, our number two destination is, Japan, which is a much tighter ally than many of the European countries. And in general, if you’re doing this to address a trade deficit, taking something we already sell and have no problem selling from one place and send it to another just generates a different numbers problem. 

That’s part of the problem with Trump’s things is that, he assumes that every individual thing stands alone when it’s all usually interconnected anyway, let’s assume for the moment that Trump is serious that Trump’s team can make it happen, that the Europeans are amenable. The trade deficit isn’t the issue here. Never is. The issue is a strategic block. 

We’re moving into a world where globalization is ending. And it’s not that I think the United States is going to have a problem finding takers for its commodity exports. Now, the issue is that not everyone will be able to afford or have the security situation. Well, that will allow them to access those materials. And if the United States were to make a strategic decision not based on the trade deficit, based on who we want to be our ally, who do we want to encourage to continue to exist in a globalizing world? 

Europe is one of the places that should be considered, it keeps the Russians in a box. It gives you a foot in the Middle East without being in the Middle East. And there’s a lot of cultural history or baggage, if you prefer, with the European family, which is where the vast majority of Americans eventually trace the roots back to, there’s a very strong argument to be made that Europe is it. And that’s where we should play. And if the United States were to pour all of its energy exports because it would take all of it, then that is a viable bloc. And then you can talk about what comes from that agricultural fusion, manufacturing fusion, military fusion, and the idea that you have an American dominated system that includes the entire cultural West. 

There’s an argument to be made that in a world that breaks into factions and regions, merging North America and Europe is arguably the most powerful option. Just keep in mind that if we do that, we no longer have the resources that are necessary to say, do the same thing with Korea and Japan, which are two advanced countries we currently have excellent relations with or with Southeast Asia, which is likely to be the most rapidly growing part of the world 

Moving forward, the United States is going to have to do many of the things that other countries are going to have to do in a globalizing world. We’re going to have to make some choices. They’re going to be a little difficult. And choosing to pour all of our energy resources into Europe, which is a region that’s experience. 

A demographic bomb might not be the biggest bang for the buck. Germany, for example. The industrial base is probably going to collapse within a decade because they won’t have a workforce in addition to their energy problems. A much better bet is probably Vietnam or Thailand or Myanmar or Indonesia. Malaysia, and I would expect that as the eurozone faces problems, because if you don’t have a consumption led economy, it’s really hard to have a currency as a eurozone prices problems. 

The United States is going to be able to choose to work with individual European countries. France looks much more viable. The U.K. is much more viable. Spain is much more interesting. Central Europe will probably last longer than Germany, Italy in a worse demographic situation than Germany. But its geography is much more friendly for power projection. It’s easy to kind of break Italy off from the rest of Europe’s strategically. 

So there’s a lot of ways you can cut this pie. And I applaud Trump for starting the conversation on what might be possible. But the specific idea that Europe buys American energy, the end. It doesn’t take us very far, but it does get us looking in the right direction. 

Quick addendum from further down the trail. Because I know I’m gonna get some hate mail for that one. So let’s make sure that the hate mail is well informed. Hate mail. The reason I say that Polish is under Donald Trump just don’t tend to happen is, he tweets something out or whatever social media he’s using, and then he leaves the room, and usually that’s the end of it. 

And that’s before you consider that he is appointing people to his cabinet who are functionally incompetent in their areas. It’s a little less true in foreign affairs. Some of the people look interesting. But the primary purpose of being on Donald Trump’s cabinet is to stroke his ego, to tell him he’s wonderful and to make him look good in public. 

And the heartbeat that you step away from that, you lose your job. So in Trump’s first term, he went through more cabinet level secretaries, than any other three American presidents in history combined. There’s just not enough time for a meaningful policy to be discussed, formed, and put in practice before the person is kicked out. But even if that was not true, Trump is a horrible personnel manager. 

One of the worst we’ve ever had. And the only other person in modern memory, who comes even close is Barack Obama, who was arguably the worst of the second worst. It’s just a difference of styles. Obama insisted on micromanaging every little thing, but then hated people and hated having conversations with them. So he never was available for anything to be managed. 

So nothing happened. And so for eight years, we really only got one law consequence passed and we had no foreign policy whatsoever. Trump is of that caliber when it comes to outcomes. So you look at our last three presidents Trump, Biden, Obama. We’ve had 16 years where the world is falling apart, where globalization is ending. And decisions like this on regionalization really are important and do need to be made. 

But we’ve had no one to lead the conversation or to carry it forward, or to turn it into policy. So kudos. Seriously, kudos to Trump for starting the conversation. And I will be pleasantly thrilled. Should the process proceed from here?

Jimmy Carter and Jihad – MNNO’s Take

You heard Peter’s take yesterday…and now you get a different perspective on Jimmy Carter’s “legacy”.

Cover photo from Wikimedia Commons 

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Jimmy Carter’s Consequential 4 Years

I typically avoid the analysis of late U.S. presidents, but Jimmy Carter is a special case. Arguably the most consequential U.S. president (in terms of global affairs) since WWII, Carter set in motion some of the most pivotal policy changes the U.S. has ever carried out. For those of you screaming at the screen about Clinton, Reagan and Eisenhower…just bear with me.

In his four years in office, Carter laid the foundation for arming the mujahideen, got the ball rolling on America’s first smart weapons, shifted the ideological approach to tax policy which led to the 90’s boom, and trust me, I could go on.

So, what made Carter so consequential? We can’t just look at his four years in office; we need to zoom out 40+ years to fully understand the lasting impact he has left on the world…and maybe this will help us realize that the policies and ideologies implemented by current presidents DO MATTER.

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The Americans Didn’t Vote With Their Wallets

Picture of a pen next to a voter ballot

Well, it looks like American politics got drunk at the holiday party and forgot who it was. Exit polls from the latest election show a significant shift in voting patterns.

People didn’t vote with their wallets, but instead focused on cultural issues. So, the traditional breakdown of wealthier individuals voting Republican and lower-income voters leaning Democrat has gone out the window.

With both parties weak and focused on issues that fail to resonate with voters, people are choosing the candidate they perceive to be the lesser of two evils. This voting dynamic should correct itself in the next few election cycles (political alignments based on income should re-emerge), but a new party system in the US is likely on the horizon.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan coming to you from New Zealand. And now that I’m safely in another country, I’ve got to do something about U.S. politics I thought I should share. We now have pretty good exit polling from all 50 states, and I can safely say that we’ve had a significant change, not just in voting patterns, but in organizational patterns for the US, politically. 

Traditionally, when we think about the last 70 years of our by party system, the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican. It’s the party of business and wealth. And if you’re working class or poorer on the dole, you’re more likely to vote Democrat, which is the party of the working man and the minorities. 

Yeah, that fell apart completely in this election and this election, regardless of what your income was up to, once you got into the 1%, they don’t track you anymore. So basically half $1 million or less had no bearing whatsoever. Every individual income category was within an eight point spread, right? Clustered around 50%, for who voted for who. 

So for the first time in American history and only one of a very rare number of times in global history, economic mix and income don’t shape your political leanings. Now, this isn’t sustainable. It’s fun for an election and maybe two and, it means a couple things. Number one, it means that the culture war is a big determining factor in how people vote. But more importantly, the idea that business and unions and rich and poor don’t shape our politics is, of course, asinine. So how people redefine how their income matters to them politically is probably gonna determine how we get out of this political mess that we’re in right now. 

Because right now we’ve got two very small, very brittle parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party that are clustered around a very short list of issues that most of the country honestly doesn’t care about all that much. And we’ve been presented with a series of, voting for the lesser of two evils. Now, for me, as an independent, I’m comfortable with that. 

I’ve been doing that a long time. But for everybody else, it’s a shit show. So we’re going to see this shift over the next election cycle or two, and money will come back into it, for better or for worse income. We’ll come back to it. Identity. We’ll come back to it from an economic point of view. And then we get a fundamentally new party system. 

What will that look like? I have no idea. Literally, this has never happened before in American history. So we have no examples whatsoever to judge by. But I can guarantee you that we’re all going to find out together, and it’s going to be really uncomfortable.

Can Mar-a-Lago Solve the Leadership Vacuum in Europe

Photo of Trump's residence in Mar-La-Go

The Europeans are having a bit of a leadership crisis at the moment, and it’s coming at an inopportune time…you know, with the Ukraine War raging on. Countries like France and Germany are facing the biggest hurdles, so let’s break those down.

President Macron of France saw his government collapse after a no-confidence vote, which left them with six months of gridlock and nothing to show for it. In Germany, Chancellor Scholz’s coalition has collapsed, and the elections that are likely coming could open the door for some unsavory characters to make their way into office.

When France and Germany struggle with leadership, so does the rest of Europe. And with Trump entering office across the pond, certain European nations are looking to get on his good side before he starts waving his policy wand.

There’s more than just a couple figureheads at stake here. This leadership vacuum risks undermining European cohesion, at a time when it is crucial that these countries lock arms and work together.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from tomorrow’s work. The wood pile. We need to talk about your, because we’re having the collapse in leadership at a really critical time, both in France and Germany. So first, let’s deal with France. France had, parliamentary elections about six months ago. That ended in a hung parliament, with no single party getting more than a third of the votes. 

In fact, we’ve got like a kaleidoscope of crazy from the hard right to the hard left. The President Macron, is in a difficult situation because under normal circumstances, the president and the parliament are controlled by the same party, or at least that’s the idea. And so you have a very strong president who appoints a prime minister, and then the prime minister forms the government, and all of it basically serves the interests of the party and is dictated by the president. 

But when the parliament is controlled by another party, you get something called cohabitation, which gets really awkward with the prime minister kind of taking the lead on domestic affairs when the president taking the lead on foreign affairs. But because power is split and prerogatives are split, it’s very difficult to get anything really substantial done. What’s going on right now is much worse than that. 

Because of that kaleidoscopic nature, no single alliance, much less no single party, controls the parliament. And so Macron had to cobble together a government out of disparate groups. And it only took three months to build, and it’s only lasted three months. And just a few days ago, we had a vote of no confidence, which destroyed the budget and the prime minister and the government. 

 

And they now have to start over. But starting over doesn’t allow them to go back and have fresh elections to try to get a better result, because there’s a clause in the French constitution that I call the can’t we all get along clause that says you can only call general elections once a year? So we have at least six more months of dysfunction in France, where the president has no mandate and where the parliament is incapable of making a government. 

 

And so the thing is just rolling over in a series of emergency measures, which is really unhealthy for any number of reasons. But if you’re looking to France for leadership at the moment, it’s just not going to be there anytime soon. Well, the situation in Germany isn’t any better. It’s just different. The German constitution prevents votes of no confidence. 

 

If you want to kick the government out, you have to provide from the seats that are in the current Bundestag. That’s their parliament. Just a different party makeup. And so when, Chancellor Schulz dismissed his finance minister and kicked one of the minor parties out of the governing coalition, he basically set the stage for fresh elections, which is something that doesn’t happen in Germany very often. 

 

We’ll probably have those in February. The problem is that in the post-Cold War environment, the German system is really fractured. And we’re seeing a lot of extremist groups getting into the political system. Traditionally, there are four parties in the German parliament, the SDP, which are the socialists, who are currently, controlling the government. That’s where all of Schultz is from. 

 

You’ve got the Greens who are just what they sound like, who control the Foreign Ministry are in the government as well. You’ve got the Free Democrats, which are kind of like a pro small business, libertarian group, which are also in the government. And they can until recently controlled the finance ministry and then in opposition, you’ve got the Christian Democrats, who at the moment are the most popular party. 

 

And if elections were held, they’d probably come in first. But all of that together, 

 

under current polling and actually polling, going back for the better part of a year suggests that those four main parties which have formed the entirety of every government we’ve seen in Germany since 1945, would only get about two thirds of the seats if elections were held today, yesterday, six months ago, a year ago, whatever, with the other third of the seats going to a grab bag of crackpot and crazy and radical and communist and Nazi and just generally nasty parties. 

 

The prohibition in Germany against, extremism is gone. And if we were to have elections, they’d gobble up a third of the seats. Now, the four main parties have all sworn left, right and center that they will never rule with groups like this, that, for example, don’t repudiate the Nazi past. But if you’re going to do that, if going to form a majority government where you need 51% of the seats when a third of the seats aren’t available, that means you’re going to have another three party coalition. 

 

One of the things we’ve seen under Olof Schultz, which I think the guy has done an okay job, considering that the restrictions he’s been under. Anyway, one of the thing is that whenever a decision has to be made, that wasn’t part of the original negotiation to form the government 3 or 4 years ago, everyone has to get together and hash it out. 

 

So whether that issue is labor policy or tax policy or budgetary policy or European policy or security policy, or Ukraine or Russian units, whatever happens to be, they all have to get back together and so here you’ve got the most powerful country in Europe economically, that can’t make a goddamn decision. And if we do have fresh elections in April, as expected, we’re going to get another three party coalition because there’s no way that two parties have enough seats to generate a majority government. 

 

So you should expect the German situation to not really change. In terms of the real policy, security policy, the Ukraine war, relations with the United States, and just expect this, almost docility and inertia. This is a really bad time for Europe for this to all be happening. The Ukraine war is raging as hot as ever. 

 

And in the United States, Donald Trump is about to take over again. And if you don’t have France or Germany who are basically capable of raising their voices for really any reason, then it is up to someone else to decide what your policy is and that someone else is probably going to be Donald Trump, because the Brits are on the outside because of Brexit and there just isn’t another large country that is cohesive enough or powerful enough. 

 

I mean, the closest would be Italy, where Giorgia meloni is reasonably powerful and popular, but it has been a long, long time in Europe since anyone has followed the Italians lead. I mean, we basically have to go to what, Emperor Constantine in the fourth century? Yeah. No. Okay, so, 

 

whether this is good or bad, of course, depends upon your view of Europe and your view of the world and whatever Donald Trump is going to come up with. 

 

The downside is obvious. Donald Trump tends to enact policy based on whoever’s flattered him most recently that something that Vladimir Putin figured out in Donald Trump’s first term. But Zelensky of Ukraine is clearly figured out and was one of the first world leaders to call to congratulate Donald Trump on his crushing success. 

 

And it’s finally everyone can see what a wonderful leader is and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, really impressed Trump. And so for several days, we had a lot of very pro-Ukrainian things come out of Mar a Lago. We’ll see if that lasts. We also have minor countries around Europe, whether it’s in the Low Countries or the bolts falling over themselves to call Trump to make their case because everyone is realized. 

 

This time around that it’s all about who speaks to him most recently that he favors, and everyone wants to be that person. It’s not a great way to run a country or a foreign policy or continent, but that’s the reality of where we are. The other issue, of course, is Ukraine, and that Donald Trump is saying that he has a plan to end the war within days of taking over, which, you know, if you can dissolve 500 years of Russian animosity in a week, that would be wonderful. 

 

But I didn’t believe it when he said the same thing about ISIS the first time around, or health care the first time around. So I really don’t believe it now. But hey, you know, stranger things have happened in the United States, in Europe in the last 70 years, so why not give it a shot anyway? That’s kind of the bad side. 

 

The good side is just because the Europeans get a voice doesn’t mean they always get it right. I mean, I realize that’s a huge thing to say in Europe, but, if you think back to the last time we had a significant strategic falling out between the Americans and the Europeans, it was over the Iraq War during the administration of George W Bush. 

 

And at that time, the president of France, Jacques Chirac, and the Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder and the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, formed what a lot of people called the axis of and suffer ability to oppose American policy. Now, there certainly were a number of good reasons to oppose America’s war in Iraq. However, Chirac and Schroeder basically allowed themselves to be propaganda props of the Russian government, something that even if those leaders never really regretted it, their people certainly did. 

 

Now, Chirac has since passed on, so I doubt we’re going to be a couple out of him. That’s particularly loud. But, Gerhard Schroeder is around still, and after he lost the chancellorship, he went to work for the Russian government, several state owned companies. And so his corruption came. Absolutely breathtaking. And we’re still cleaning up that mess. 

 

And by we, I mean German policymakers and French policymakers. And now we have to figure out how this all goes down with Trump being large in charge. So the future of Europe, the policies of Europe probably no longer are going to be flowing through Brussels or Paris or Berlin. They’re going to be flowing through more moral law grow. 

 

And I gotta admit, that’s going to be a hoot. 

Trump Tariffs Part 2 – Canada and Mexico

Photo of a bicycle in front of the Canadian flag

Unlike Trump’s proposed tariffs for China, the tariffs heading for Canada and Mexico can be viewed as leverage (or bargaining chips) to address issues amongst our North American trade partners.

Trump’s goal isn’t to disrupt North American manufacturing, he’s just looking to gain the upper hand for negotiations on things like migration and drug control. But that doesn’t mean these tariffs won’t sting. US citizens should expect to see a nice bump in costs to goods crossing these borders. Trump’s North American tariff strategy is a bit reminiscent of Cold War policies where trade access was tied to concessions.

How are our neighbors going to react? I would expect Mexico to cooperate, especially with their new (and hopefully more pragmatic) President Claudia Sheinbaum at the helm. Relations with Canada could sour as they are resistant to any action that could be perceived as ‘bending the knee’ to the US.

Tomorrow we’ll dive a bit deeper on one of the things Trump is looking to stop…fentanyl.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Alright. We’re trying the drone today. Today is part two of the Trump’s Tariffs series. Yesterday, we covered China and discussed how what Trump is achieving there is an industrial reorganization. Tariffs may actually, in the right policy combination, work for that.

That’s very different from what’s going on with Mexico and Canada. Mexico and Canada are the number two and number one trading partners collectively.

If the tariffs that Trump says he’s going to put on actually happen and there is no retaliation, we’re looking at something along the lines of roughly a $1,500 hit to every man, woman, and child in the United States. So, potentially big. That’ll hit some industries more than others. Automotive is definitely the one that will get hit the most because there are a lot of products, especially in U.S.-Mexico trade, where intermediate products go back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth across the border.

The administrative cost of imposing a single 25% would be huge. It would be easier just to do it every time something crosses. So, all of a sudden, you’re adding $5,000 to $10,000 to the cost of a vehicle that is made in North America. It’s an inflationary issue, an employment issue, and an industry issue. There is no version of the future of the United States that is post-China that does not involve Mexico and Canada very, very strongly.

Keep in mind that Trump put his name on the most recent trade deal with both countries. That’s NAFTA Two. So, potentially very, very, very big.

However, what Trump is attempting to achieve with Mexico and Canada is not the same as what he’s trying to achieve in China. In China, he’s actually trying to move industry. He doesn’t seem to have a problem with the manufacturing supply chains we have here in North America.

His concern is he wants to use the lever or the hammer of trade and tariffs to get progress, in his view, on immigration, migration, and especially on fentanyl. So basically, it’s an “if this, then that.”

Now, that’s not a crazy idea. In fact, there are a couple of reasons to expect it to work. First off, that’s the whole concept of globalization and the Cold War: that the United States used its Navy to patrol the global oceans to force open international trade, including our own market.

We would do this for you if, in exchange, you would allow the United States to write your security policies. That was the policy right up until 1992.

Now, we got away from that in the post-Cold War era, where free trade became a goal in and of itself. Trump wants to dial the clock back 35 years and start renegotiating what security policies mean to include migration and fentanyl.

The idea that you can do that makes a lot of sense because the United States is the only large, rich, consumption-led economy in the world. That means that the U.S. president, whoever that happens to be, has a huge amount of negotiating room to get what he wants, whatever the issue happens to be. So, you want access to this market? That’s fine.

You have to do XYZ, A, B, and C, and you have to do that maybe first.

The question is time frame.

In the case of Mexico, it’s probably going to work because it’s worked before. In Trump’s first term, he tried something very similar on migration issues and forced a deal with the then-president, Lopez Obrador. We now have a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who is much better at math than her predecessor.

So, it’s just a question of how these two ultimately do or do not get along.

In the case of Canada, it’s probably going to be a little bit more sticky. The ruling government of Justin Trudeau is a minority government. It is in trouble, it’s not popular, and it faces an election next year. Capitulating to Donald Trump is generally not a great way to win accolades with leftist supporters.

So, we might actually see relations between the United States and Mexico pull forward in its own way, while relations between the United States and Canada suffer.

But a much bigger issue is whether or not what Trump is wanting to do with Mexico and Canada can actually work.

There are ways that Mexico, in particular, can cooperate with the United States on migration. That has happened in the past. I’m sure it will happen again in the future. But fentanyl is different.

Trump’s understanding of fentanyl is that the precursor materials come from China, whereas the turning to finish the drugs happens in Mexico, and then they cross the border into the U.S. That’s accurate, but it’s an incomplete understanding because fentanyl is different from cocaine.

Cocaine has very specific economics and geography of production and transport. Fentanyl does not.

To understand the pros and cons of what Trump is trying to achieve with trade policy, we need to look at the supply chain for fentanyl. Then, we might see how things could work a little bit differently.

That’s going to take a whole other video. We will tackle that tomorrow.

Trump Tariffs Part 1 – China

An AI generated image of connex boxes with American and Chinese flags on them

The Trump administration is planning to impose some hefty tariffs on China. This isn’t just to reform trade practices and show China “who’s the boss”, but rather to shift industrial production away from China permanently.

Trump’s goal is to wean the US off that $500 billion worth of annual imports. This is going to be a challenging time for everyone involved; China is having their feet swept out from under them, and the US will have to find someone who can replace the Chinese (because we surely can’t do it on our own). And not to mention an unwanted bump in living costs for the Americans.

It’s not all bad news bears though. The US has enough cheap energy to help build all the processing and manufacturing it might need, but it will require significant investments, policy changes, and TIME. Trump has the right idea, but his approach is lacking a bit of the strategic depth that this will require.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today’s the 26th of November, and today we’re going to talk about the incoming Trump administration’s initial plans for trade policy.

Last night, Donald Trump texted out that he plans to levy very sharp tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China—our three largest trading partners. For this discussion, we’ll focus on the Chinese component.

We’re talking about China first because Mexico and Canada are different issues with different factors at play. First, with China: we don’t like China, and China doesn’t like us very much. The Trump tariffs, if implemented on the Chinese merchandise exports that come to the United States—roughly half a trillion dollars a year—would increase the average cost of living for the average American, every man, woman, and child, by about a thousand U.S. dollars a year.

The stuff that comes from China, like I said, is mostly manufactured goods, almost exclusively. The bulk of it falls into the electronics category, which includes computers, cell phones, cellular technology, white goods, consumer goods, and parts that can go into pretty much anything.

The Chinese have a very predatory trade system, so overall support from the U.S. citizenry is likely to be pretty high, despite the cost of this. This is a more traditional tariff goal here. The Trump administration has long wanted to reroute global trade flows, specifically where China is involved.

That means punishing the Chinese until alternatives can be generated. But therein lies the rub. No American trade policy going back to World War II has ever been very good at building that alternative system. We punish countries we think are engaging in unfair trade practices, but those punishments are usually designed to get them to dismantle those trade policies so we can return to something more fair or normal.

That is not the goal this time around. The goal here is to permanently relocate industrial plants. Simply throwing on a tariff and funneling the money to a general fund doesn’t achieve that. You also need to build a complementary industrial policy that takes some of the income and uses it to build a long-term alternative.

Here’s where the challenge and the opportunity lie. First, the challenge: the things China does, it doesn’t do by itself. It has relatively low-cost wages, especially for its mode of production. However, it’s not a very profitable industrial power. It has only managed to get to where it is now and maintain its position through a massive amount of subsidies.

If those subsidies were to go away, you would see mass de-industrialization of China, which would probably lead to the collapse of its political system. The Chinese aren’t even going to consider that, which is ultimately what a normal trade policy would aim for. To overpower that, you’d not only need a fairly steep tariff rate—much higher than the 10-25% that Trump’s team is suggesting—you’d also have to build an alternative.

When it comes to things like electronics assembly and components creation, the United States is not a very competitive player in that market. Our labor, to be perfectly blunt, is too highly skilled. The same goes for Canada and Mexico. You’d need to develop a different model, and doing that quickly is very difficult and expensive.

However, there is some low-hanging fruit. The Chinese dominate not just electronics manufacturing and assembly but also materials processing—turning bauxite into aluminum, cobalt into cobalt metal, and lithium into battery chassis, for example. This is something the U.S. and the rest of the world have largely stepped back from for two reasons:

  1. It takes up space and is environmentally damaging, leading to regulatory challenges.
  2. If the Chinese are willing to pollute their environment, exploit their workers, and subsidize the industry, why compete with them when they can do it cheaper and hand you the end product?

There are problems with that argument. The Chinese have discovered that this gives them leverage in trade talks. However, rebuilding this capacity elsewhere isn’t difficult or even particularly expensive. For example, the U.S., thanks to the shale revolution, produces a huge amount of excess natural gas and has the cheapest natural gas in the world. From that, we’ve developed the cheapest electricity in the world.

Over the last 15 years, the chemicals industry has shifted to run on natural gas rather than oil whenever possible. As of 2024, the United States is by far the largest, highest-quality, and lowest-cost producer of intermediate chemical inputs for modern manufacturing.

But it took the free market 15 years to make that happen. If we want to speed up the process for everything else, it means implementing an industrial policy that uses revenue from Chinese tariffs to help build the supporting infrastructure. This is low-hanging fruit that we need to address anyway. The Chinese won’t be around much longer, and even if they were, we wouldn’t want them to maintain the leverage they currently have.

Building up industrial plants isn’t necessarily expensive. For example, creating capacity for something like aluminum might only cost a few billion dollars. It’s not costly or time-consuming, but “cheap and quick” isn’t the same as “free and immediate.” It requires a policy to make it happen. Otherwise, the market will handle it over the next 15-20 years, but I’d argue we need to start the transition much sooner.

Once that foundation is established, we can begin tackling more difficult pieces like electronics. So far, the Trump administration has not demonstrated an awareness of this level of nuance in tariff policy. The general belief seems to be, “A tariff is good. Do it, and we win.” It’s going to take a lot more effort than that.

That’s the situation with China. The situations with Mexico and Canada are very different, and we’ll tackle those tomorrow.

Ukraine Can Now Strike Russia Direct

Photo of the ATACSM rocket being fired

The Biden administration just gave Ukraine the greenlight to use American weaponry inside of Russian territory. So, what does this mean for the future of the Ukraine War?

The biggest change will be Ukraine’s usage of long-range ballistic missiles (mainly the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS) to target military infrastructure within the Russian border. While there will be some impacts to Russian logistics, this likely won’t lead to any significant breakthroughs. And it doesn’t look the Russians are too worried about this either…otherwise someone important would have been doing the press conference.

Without too much concern for immediate escalation, this greenlight allows Ukraine to soften Russian positions and supply lines along the frontlines. But perhaps the biggest thing to watch, is that Trump now has another card up his sleeve once he gets into office and begins his negotiations with Russia.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from chilly Colorado. It is Monday, November 18th, and yesterday, on the 17th, the Biden administration lifted restrictions on the use of American weapons by the Ukrainian government. They can now launch wherever they want in Russian space. The weapon system that is of the most importance are the outcomes, which are kind of a rocket ballistic missile that has a range of about 200 miles.

It’s broadly expected that within the next day or three, the Ukrainians will be using them to target things like ammo dumps, air assets, and especially rail bridges—basically anything to snarl the logistics on the Russian side of the equation.

The two areas you’re going to see the most activity are in the vicinity of Kursk, where the Ukrainians have a foothold in Russian territory, and an area in the Donbas near where the Russians have been focusing strongly on capturing the city of Picross, given that it’s a rail hub.

The whole idea is to disrupt the ability of the Russians to get military assets to those theaters. There’s probably not going to be too much of an impact on things like air power on the Russian side because already 90% of the jets that the Russians have been using to operate in Ukraine are beyond that 200-mile range.

You might push a few more back, so this is concentrating the fight on those two main salients. But it’s probably not going to generate any sort of meaningful breakthrough in either direction, though it will certainly help the Ukrainians hold out.

There are three big things that we do need to consider now that we’ve had this kind of upgraded military capacity.

First of all, I don’t see this as a meaningful escalation in the war. I don’t think it’s going to generate any sort of significant response by the Russians. That’s not just because the Russians have, by my count, had over 200 “red lines” that the West has eventually skipped across.

You can always tell if the Russians are serious or not by who does the speaking. In this case, the Russian that came out and condemned the American action, saying this was an escalation, was a guy by the name of Dmitry Peskov, who is basically their press attaché. It didn’t even come from a policymaker. So, you know, it’s not serious.

I don’t expect the Russians to do anything significantly more. Keep in mind, the Russians have been crossing a lot of what the West would consider red lines—with spies, sabotage, and even bringing in North Koreans to fight in the war. There have been a lot of steps here, and that was probably ultimately what drove the Biden administration to take this action. But I don’t think this is an escalation in the traditional sense.

Second, if the Russians want to rebuild their credibility when it comes to red lines, they have to talk. The way you establish red lines and mutual deterrence is through a direct face-to-face summit. Putin, however, has refused to pick up the phone and call any leaders who are decision-makers because he knows that if he does, everything is on the table.

He would then have to give something up. Since the Russians have been pushing broad-spectrum interference in Western affairs—whether politically, economically, or strategically—for three years now, he’d have to give up a lot of that to get anything he wants. So it’s simpler to just avoid communication altogether.

We’ve been here before. When the Soviet Union developed its first atomic weapon back in 1949, that was the height of the Cold War. Things were really sketchy, and we didn’t get our first real bilateral summit after that weapons test until 1955, after Stalin had died. I’m not saying we have to wait for Putin to die or anything like that, but we’re not in a position in Russia politically where it’s feasible to have that conversation.

As long as the Russians feel they’re making incremental gains in Ukraine, which they have for about a year now, there’s no need for a broader renegotiation of the relationship. Always keep in mind that Ukraine was never a one-off; it’s the ninth post-Soviet conflict the Russians have either instigated or been involved in, and it won’t be the last.

Regardless of how Ukraine gets settled, one way or another, there will be another series of wars further west that will involve NATO countries until we get to that point. Putin feels that negotiations are better carried out on the battlefield rather than by phone or in person.

Which brings us to the third thing: this is really interesting timing for this step by the Biden administration. Obviously, Biden’s not going to be president after January 20th, and there’s going to be no succession within the Democratic structures.

Donald Trump is coming back, and here we have a very clear step forward that puts a fascinating chip on the table for potential negotiations down the road. If there’s anything we understand about Donald Trump, it’s that he sees everything differently. Putting this card into his hand to play with Putin at a later time is kind of fascinating.

What Trump will do with this is entirely up to him, but Biden appears to be setting the stage for Trump to have whatever he needs to force the Russians to the table in whatever way he wants to. This is a really interesting approach to bipartisan foreign policy that we used to see all the time during transition periods but really haven’t seen in the last eight years.

All right, that’s it for me. Everyone take care.

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Trump’s Cabinet Picks: Loyalty Over Experience

Photo of Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard at a podium

Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees are rolling in and let’s just say they’re not the A-team, but what did we expect?

Trump’s choices aren’t exactly the pick of the litter, but they all fall into one category: they’re yes-men. As long as these people will keep Trump’s echo chamber intact, he’ll keep handing out nominations like Oprah gives away cars. And if anyone does decide they know better than him, they’ll get a swift kick to the street.

Trump’s cabinet is another example of the erosion of the Republican party. As the business leaders, fiscal conservatives and national security experts get marginalized, the party shifts more and more under Trump’s cult of personality. The Senate remains the only real stronghold of the “old” Republican party, but if Trump’s push for recess appointments goes through, then that will be gone too.

There are some standouts to these appointees though. Lighthizer is one of the stronger ones and Gabbard is one of the scarier ones. There’s a lot to unpack here, so today’s video is a bit longer…

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide 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, so we can be sure that 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.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the home office in Colorado. I’ve received a small flood of requests for me to do a video on what I think of Trump’s, cabinet appointees and who some of these guys are doozies. I mean, we’ve got a guy who’s supposed to be the top health authority in the country who thinks that WiFi causes cancer. 

The person who’s supposed to manage the military is a culture warrior, and the guy who is supposed to lead up national law enforcement. While his only past experience with law enforcement is being the subject of an investigation into sex trafficking of minors. So, you know, we got some real winners here. But rather than go on a blow by blow, I think it’s better for use of everybody’s time to talk about the Trump relationship with the government, especially at the top people he picks and how that is kind of taken in an interesting direction. 

So first off, the nature of the cabinet secretaries that Trump is selecting here, the primary job of the people who lead the departments in the US government is not necessarily to implement policy. I mean, that’s obviously on their to do list, but it’s mostly to generate a degree of awareness for the president. The US is a big place. 

The world is a bigger place, and there’s a lot going on, and no one can be aware of any of everything. And no one can be an expert in everything. So it’s primarily the job of the cabinet secretaries to become experts on their topic and use their departments to generate a series of briefings on context and awareness, to present to the president so that the president always has the best information available and can always make decisions in an informed manner. 

A couple problems here. When it comes to Donald Trump, number one, he insists on believing that not only his is he always the smartest person in the room, but he’s always the smartest person in the room on any given topic. So from his point of view, the cabinet secretaries are not there to generate awareness because that’s not necessary. 

The cabinet secretaries are there to be servile, to basically rubberstamp and congratulate him on everything that he does. If you remember back to for his Trump term, most of the cabinet meetings opened with everyone talking about how wonderful Trump was. It was almost like a cult meeting. Now, when you insist that you live in an echo chamber and you get to choose your own people, an echo chamber tends to be what you get. 

So I urge you to not pontificate over what this person or that person’s appointments are, that this or that department happens to be, because that’s not really the point of what Trump is doing here. He’s building an inner circle that will not be entrusted with leadership, but are simply designed to tell him that his leadership is really what everybody needs. 

  

If you’re interested in policy, for whatever reason, you’re better bet. Rather than looking at tweets appointing is to look at his appointment schedule, because Trump tends to do whatever the last person to flatter him once. That was a much better guide in his first term, and I see no reason for that to be different in this. 

True. So it’s really hard for me to get excited over this or that Trump appointee, whether it’s somebody I like or someone I despise because they’re really not there to do the normal job, they’re there to be toadies. And if they were competent at doing their job and telling the president what he needs to hear. Well, as we saw in his first term, he just fires them. 

And so they don’t have to tell him. No, they just have to tell him. Yes, but could you can also consider and that’s enough. Remember that Trump went through more cabinet level appointees than any U.S. president in history, because anyone who tried to do their job got axed. So second, a far more illuminating thing to ruminate on is to find out just how far gone the Republican Party really is. 

And we’re going to get an answer to that question before the end of January. The Republican Party used to be known as the party of adults. There were three factions at the core of it the national security community, the fiscal conservatives who wanted to balance the budget and the business community. And if there’s one thing that these three factions agreed upon, it’s it’s successful leadership required a degree of organization or delegation, two words that are not ones that Trump uses a whole lot. 

So Trump purged those factions, all of them. He relied upon them heavily in his first term because he was new to the field. But when they didn’t match his personality, then fired him pretty quick. So he purged them from the entire system, starting with his administration, then moving on to the Republican Party as an institution, and then even going after their champions in Congress. 

Then he spent most of his time in the political wilderness ensuring that these three factions could never come back, leading us with an institution of the Republican Party that has basically been gutted, of what used to make it the Republican Party and reducing it to what it is today, which is a Trump echo chamber. Or if you want to use that technical term, a cult of personality. 

Now, what is wrong with Trump’s cabinet picks is not going to be a secret. Normally the process goes like this. The president elect selects his people. He submits them for security checks to groups like the CIA and the FBI and all that good stuff. And they come back to him with a report of what kind of skeletons are in their closets. 

And considering that one of these nominees, likes to drop off dead bears in Central Park or chop off whale heads on beaches, we can imagine. And, we cracked the skeletons. We’re going to fight anyway. Once he has his report in hand, he can change his mind about whether this is the person he really wants to be in his administration. 

But if he decides it’s all okay, the report isn’t squashed. It’s handed over to the Senate. Who has to do the ratification. And even if the Senate decides to confirm an appointment, that might be a little. Whoops. Some version of that report will ultimately be released to the public. So we’re going to find out everything there is to know about some of these people. 

And some of these people are seriously sketchy, but it’s the Senate that’s the key factor in all of this, because while Trump has basically co-opted the Republican Party, the Senate’s kind of like the last cluster of holdouts, if that’s the right term. You see, in, in the Republican Party itself, it’s a non-elected institution. So Trump and Trump’s people can basically go through there and bit by bit, use, advocates and party activists and his real core supporters to just basically flood through the whole system and kick out the people they don’t want. 

And that has been done in spades. And then the House of Representatives has elections every two years. So again, it’s very vulnerable to the political whims of the moment, especially if your party leader wants something done. But the Senate’s different. Only one third of those seats are up for election every two years. So it takes six years to get your first flush, if that’s the right term. 

And so while Donald Trump has now been at the top of the American conservative pile for the last eight years, and so he has just been through his fifth consecutive period of being able to shape the House to his own norms. She hasn’t even been through two full cycles for the Senate. So there’s a number of senators still ascribe to the old Republican ideals of the business community, national security issues and fiscal jurisprudence. 

And so if there are people who are going to oppose Trump, that is where they’re going to be clustered at the moment. And it’s the Senate that confirms presidential appointees. And so Trump is attempting to get the Senate to do something called a recess appointment. In the Constitution, there’s a clause that says that if the Senate is not sitting for an extended period of time, then the president can just appoint people he wants and they don’t have to go through the confirmation process at all. 

Well, the time limit established by the Supreme Court is ten days. So Trump is basically asking the Senate to not even do their job, not even short to work for the first two weeks so that all of his appointments could just flow right through. Now, normally, I wouldn’t give this any credence at all, because it would be an unprecedented surrender of congressional power and would basically gut the Senate as an institution. 

But there’s a lot about Trump that is unprecedented, and he has already made the request. And so the question is whether it will be acceded to agreement. And if the Senate does meekly accede to Trump’s demands, then the Republican Party, as we once knew it, is well and truly dead. We might as well just take down all the bunting and the labels and the bumper stickers and label it MAGA, because that’s that would be what it is that. 

Third, there are two Trump appointments that don’t kind of match this pattern. And they are worth of a deeper look. The first one is Robert Lighthizer. Now, Robert Lighthizer served as the US Trade Representative under the first Trump term. And he was one of the very, very few people that any policy autonomy and actually served the entirety of his four year term. 

Now, Trump has already approached him about taking his old job back, and apparently Lighthizer and Trump were in negotiations over the specifics of what this role would look like, whether or not it’s just the US, a TR position, or more of an oversight position, that would all be over the office of the Trade Representative as well as the Commerce Department, in order to have more overarching authority over trade policy. 

Now, Lighthizer is somebody who has earned repeatedly the respect of the business community. He’s been in and out of trade law and in the administration level ever since Reagan. And he’s very, very good at what he does and the trade deals that were negotiated under the Trump administration, NAFTA to Korea, Japan, all of these were done by Lighthizer personally and their deals that greatly increased, America’s authority over trade law on a global basis. 

He’s a solid choice, and he is definitely worthy of the position. If Trump will have him back, the only question at this point seems to be the details over the level of authority that he would have. We should have an answer to that within days. And if he was appointed, I have no doubt that he would sail through the Senate. 

The second person is on the other side of the equation. That’s Tulsi Gabbard. She used to be a, representative in the House of Representatives from Hawaii. She was a Democrat. She, switched teams to MAGA. Not too long ago. And, who, the job she’s been nominated for is the director of national intelligence. Now, there are over a dozen arms of the US government that have some sort of intelligence capability or central intelligence. 

Obviously, the FBI, the DEA, Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and the DNI, whose job is to basically ride herd over all of them and collaborate and manage all of the agency so that no one is working across purposes and that in a single person, you can have somebody that is so wired and so aware that the president has a one stop shop when they need information. 

Now, Tulsi Gabbard has never been in a managerial position ever. Not even a fast food restaurant. She’s never run an agency. She’s never managed people. She’s never managed multiple agencies. She has no background in intelligence, as an operative, as an analyst, as a manager. And that’s before I start saying the bad things about her. She’s an active cult member, not the mega cult. 

She has her own culture. You. Can you be a member of two cults? I’m really not sure. She’s a conspiracy theorist. She’s a friend of the Syrian government. And it’s the general opinion of most of the American intelligence community that she’s been an active Russian agent for years. All of this will come up in her vetting document. Gabbard is the singularly least qualified person who has ever been nominated for any cabinet position, and we have had some real bozos in years past, being pushed into big chairs. 

She couldn’t pass a security check to work in a daycare center, and DNI has to pass the most rigorous security check of any American ever, because they are literally the nerve center for all secret information that the United States captures and manages. Now, unfortunately for all of us, Trump’s cabinet picks really don’t matter much. Because he’s not picking people for competence or to help him govern. 

They just don’t have much authority over him day to day policy. And in doing so, it means that they just aren’t going to have much of an impact, for better or for worse. So whether you love him or hate him, whether you love or hate the picks, I. I’m afraid to say that it really doesn’t matter too much. 

The one exception, of course, is Gabbard. In that position, this person could do an immense amount of damage, and I know for certain that the Russians are sour, waiting at the possibility of having their girl at the heart of the US intelligence system.