Venezuela and the War Powers Act

Photo of a US Naval Carrier

The Trump administration’s campaign against alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling is raising some eyebrows. Let’s unpack the War Powers Act and how it applies to this.

The goal of this piece of legislation was to limit unilateral action; it requires presidents to brief Congress within 48 hours of deploying and withdraw them within 60 days unless an extension was approved. But with every president calling this Act unconstitutional since it was put in place (and the fact that Congress hasn’t had the gumption to challenge a president since it was established), this move will most likely go unchecked.

So, Trump has free rein unless Congress decides to step up after 50+ years of silence. Meaning the current operation involving warships, bombers, and 10,000+ US personnel targeting Venezuelan ships will continue with limited transparency.

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Transcript

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re gonna talk about what is going on in the southern Caribbean, specifically the Trump administration’s, targeting of alleged drug smuggling vessels coming out of Venezuela. A lot of people have written them asking me for a comment on the legality of this. And the best I can give you is that this is a gray area, no matter really how you look at it. 

According to the Constitution, the US president has the authority over the armed forces, and that is largely without restriction, unless in case of war, in which case Congress by a two thirds majority, needs to declare war. But Congress hasn’t declared a war since World War two, leaving all military policy basically in the hands of the president unless and until Congress says otherwise. 

Now, in 1973, Congress did say otherwise, and they passed something called the War Powers Act that says within 48 hours of any commitment of American forces into a combat situation, the president has to brief Congress on the details and then withdraw all forces within 60 days unless the president applies and is approved, for an extension. Anything beyond that requires the two thirds majorities by Congress to actually declare a military conflict. 

Now, since then, every single president, including Trump, won and Trump, too, has said that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional. But the War Powers Act was passed by a veto proof majority over the objections of the president at the time. And so you have this conflict between the executive branch and the legislative branch, and it really means that the president still can do whatever he wants so long as Congress does not act. 

And since 1973, we have not had a situation where two thirds of the Congress has been willing to oppose the president on military affairs. And that is where we remain today. So that leaves the president the ability to do whatever he wants. Now, under Trump administration, notification of Congress is something that has become very weak under the best of circumstances, and military affairs are no difference. 

There have been times in the past where the Trump administration has done something militarily and said that when it hit the news that was notification of Congress, which I don’t think any court back up. But again, Congress has not gotten together and had two thirds of its members say otherwise, which is what would be necessary in the current situation. 

Members of the House Military Affairs Committees and the intelligence committees had basically been furious with the Trump administration, not just the Democrats, especially the Republicans, because the Trump people who have come in to brief them have basically provided no information and no proof that any of these, ships were carrying drugs. Does that mean, I think that the Trump administration is just blowing up random ships? 

No, because there’s there’s quite an operation going on down there. Now. We have over 10,000 American service people that are involved in this operation. And at any given time, at least eight warships. We also are flying bombers, off the coast of Venezuela. So something is afoot. And the Trump administration is not sharing very many details with anyone, especially with Congress. 

And that leaves all of us kind of grasping at straws. All I can tell you for certain is that unless and until Congress starts acting like Congress, the Trump administration has full leave to do whatever it wants legally, where that takes us. I don’t have enough information to say right now.

Congressional Midterms: Electoral Bloodbath or More of the Same?

There has been plenty of public frustration over Trump’s policies and actions, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to political momentum. With only one-third of Senate seats even contested, a major shift isn’t going to happen. Both parties are stuck in a dysfunctional cycle, so we’re likely going to see more of the same rather than an electoral bloodbath.

On a longer timeline, we’re very clearly heading towards an entire political system reset. Just remember that we’ve got a lot of a runway in front of us…

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado today. We’re taking a question from the Patreon crowd. And specifically, are we going to have an electoral bloodbath in the midterms? 

Let me go with a partial no. And a big I don’t know. First the partial no. Keep in mind that if you want to change the math on the big issues, like, say, impeachment, it’s not the House of Representatives that matters. 

It’s the Senate. And only one third of senatorial seats are up for election every two years. So even if we have just a swing massively in the direction of the Democrats, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Donald Trump is facing a third impeachment attempt. That, or I guess would be the first one to be successful. Third time’s a drama, whatever you want to call it. 

Anyway. So unlikely. Second and far more importantly. 

The Democrats are a mess. Let me put a few things into context. If you are not just a Democrat, but an independent like me, or maybe a moderate Republican or an old school Republican on national defense and business issues, there’s a lot going on right now for you to be more than a little annoyed with, we basically have a breakdown in the military in terms of its functionality because of, the Defense Secretary’s purges. 

We have a Russian agent in the white House that’s running the intelligence system. We have a a guy at the FBI who’s basically destroying domestic law enforcement. We have a guy of health and Human services which is breaking down the vaccine system, which keeps us all safe and healthy. And we have a policy that has basically been in and out and in and out and in and out of terrorists and trade wars ever since day one of this administration, especially since April 2nd. 

And so our expansion of our industrial plant has come to a screeching halt, and we’re seeing attacks on higher education that are basically shutting down the pipeline for skilled labor into the country that comes from that used to draw the best and the brightest from the world over. And we’re in the early stages of seeing significant rises in labor costs, which are making the construction of things like new homes almost impossible. 

And we have 50% tariffs on copper and aluminum and steel, which are the things you need if you want to build housing or industrial plant more generally. And we’re setting up for a significant economic downturn over the course of the next year in an environment where we should be experiencing boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There’s a lot for a lot of people to be angry about. 

And yet none of it is resonated politically. Trump’s not like dominating the polls or anything, but he’s hanging in there and he’s continuing to do things that piss off a lot of people and facing absolutely no meaningful blowback in that sort of environment. Only one issue has risen to the point that it actually seems to concern him. And that’s the Epstein scandal. 

This seems to be the only issue that the Democrats are getting any traction on. And if this is as good as it gets for them, it is difficult for me to imagine, in a world 18 months from now, where we have a significant shift in political views in this country now, Americans are fickle in their politics. I don’t consider this, a forecast, but all of the normal things that we have seen during my entire life of watching politics just don’t seem to apply right now. 

The Democrats are rudderless. They’re leaderless. They’re unable to mobilize anything in Congress, despite the fact that we almost have a 5050 split in both houses. And even at the state level, we just don’t see anyone rising to the occasion. Now, if you’ve been following me for a while, you know, I’ve been talking about the disintegration of both political parties for some time. 

The Republicans have basically degraded into a one man cult of personality, of which the business community, the national security community and the law enforcement are not part of. And the Democrats have basically just become a circus without a tent, in that sort of environment, 

The opportunity for a broad reset of the American political system is inevitable, but inevitable does not mean imminent. And building parties in the United States takes time. The way the Constitution reads is each of the 50 states has their own party that can, in coalition form, a national party. We haven’t started to build an alternative. 

Today’s Trump Republicans or today’s chaos Democrats. And until that process happens, the midterms will be basically a redux of what we’ve seen the last three election cycles, which is very, very, so electoral bloodbath. I don’t see it broad electoral reset over the remainder of the decade. That’s a different question.

So, You Want to Invade Venezuela…

Map of a bay of Venezuela

US military intervention in Venezuela keeps getting floated around, but I’m not sure people fully comprehend how UGLY this would be.

Venezuela is a mess. They have a corrupt leader, who has caused irreparable harm to the nation…but getting rid of him is the easy part. Caracas is the Everest of this endeavor, and it all comes down to geography. Sure, Caracas looks coastal, but it sits on a plateau behind 2 miles of tunnels and steep mountains. Translation: it’s not easy to get to.

We are talking about the US military though, so capturing Caracas wouldn’t be difficult. Holding and sustaining the population afterward is the scary part. We’re talking a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar project, with a population that depends upon imports that travel on fragile transit infrastructure. Think of this is a South American Chechnya.

Before I say this next line, allow me to emphasize that this as a VERY bad idea. But if someone was really gung on invading Venezuela, the western port city of Maracaibo is where I would start.

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Transcript

Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about Venezuela because relations between the Americans and the Venezuelans are getting pretty nasty, and people are starting to discuss, I wouldn’t say plan, but discuss whether or not there’s going to be a military intervention. At the moment, I don’t have any guidance on that. The Maduro government of Venezuela is obviously horrendously corrupt and obviously is involved in drug trafficking, if not to the degree that the Trump administration asserts. 

Most of the drugs still come from Colombia up through Central America and Mexico and the United States doesn’t mean that there’s not an important vector coming out of Venezuela, but it’s nowhere near the primary one. But the Maduro government is absolutely involved with the smuggling. So, you know, everybody gets a piece for the right, everybody gets a piece where they’re wrong. 

Let’s talk about what a military intervention would look like. The population of Venezuela, most notably the capital, Caracas, is only a few miles from the coast, which makes it sound like it’s ripe for a maritime intervention or an amphibious landing. But you would be wrong, because there’s a very strong coastal uplift with mountains basically paralleling the coast in that entire section of the country. 

So to get to Caracas, you actually have to go up into the mountains and then punch through a couple of tunnels, one of which is about a mile and a third long. The other one’s a little less than a third of a mile, half a mile somewhere in there. In order to get to the plateau where the city is. 

So four lane highway, two tunnels, which collectively are about two miles long, which means knocking off Nicolas Maduro and his government, is not the hard part. The hard part is then keeping the city and the country alive between the incompetence of Maduro. He used to be a bus driver and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who was touched. This country has completely destroyed their capacity for growing food and even if you remove the government and everything, all of a sudden remembers how to do it. 

You still have a couple of growing seasons before anything would be back on the sheet. So I strongly encourage you to consider what happened back in Iraq when the United States knocked off the Hussein government. Food production plummeted for a couple of years before eventually gradually recovering. In the meantime, the United States was responsible for keeping the civilians alive. 

But in the Iraq scenario, we could ship things in through northern Iraq because Turkey was an ally and there was infrastructure in place. We could ship things in from the south because Kuwait was an ally, and there was a U.S. military base right there, and there was a port, right at the southern tip of Iraq. So there were a number of ways that things could be brought in. 

You don’t have that with Caracas. The food production regions are more deeply in the interior, and you required billions, if not tens of billions of dollars of reconstruction work to bring online. And you have to ship in everything for the capital through this four lane highway. And this is a place that, based on whose math you’re using, imports somewhere between 70 and 80% of their food, mostly ultimately from the United States. 

But that’s another issue anyway. So tunnels, one that’s over a mile long, even a mild explosive by, say, a TV star who decides he wants to stick it to the Americans, shuts that down, and now you’re forced to use a road that was built before 1950 that goes up and over the mountains, which takes a lot longer now, a lot longer subjective. 

If you use the tunnel system to get in from the coast and there’s really no traffic, this is less than a half hour drive. If you go up and over, it’s maybe an hour and 15 minutes. But if you’re talking about a military occupation where the United States is directly responsible for the security and food distribution over 5 million people, that’s a whole nother problem. 

You’re talking about hours and any number of ways that things can go wrong. One of the advantages we had in Iraq that everything was a flat desert road. Mountains are very, very different. Basically, you’d be working in a tropical Chechnya. It would be ugly. And for those of you think that. Hey, air power. Yeah. No, it takes about a thousand times the energy to move a pound by air that it does by water. 

And maybe 100 times compared to what it takes to move by road. And like the Berlin Airlift, which people like to point to, we were flying things from western Germany to West Berlin, which was less than 100 miles here. The nearest airbase is what Cuba, which we’re not going to be operating from. So you’d have to set up some sort of operation on one of the outlying lines, like, I don’t know, Margarita, and then fly in from there and just. 

No, no, no, there’s no way you support 5 million people that way. So knocking off the top cut of the head off a snake, that’s the easy part. Reconstruction is an ongoing issue that would take years, if not decades, and keeping everyone alive from here to there would be just beyond what the U.S. military could handle. If this is not me saying we should do it this way, but if this were to happen, the more reasonable approach would be to do the invasion via a place called Maracaibo, which, if you look at a map of Venezuela, is this big bay to the west? 

It has no escarpment separating from the water. The major population centers are actually ports. It’d be much easier for U.S. forces to operate it. And two other things to keep in mind. Mark Cabo is a major oil producing region, and it doesn’t particularly like Caracas. It never has. And if there’s ever going to be a secession war in Venezuela, it’s going to be Maracaibo trying to go its own way. 

So the likelihood of the population being hostile is much lower, and the likelihood of being able to keep the population alive is much higher. So if if it’s going to be done, that would be the way to do it. Not me saying that this is a Latin American war. That would be fun. It wouldn’t be. But you don’t have to make it a disaster.

All That Bitchin’ Won’t Keep China Around

A skyline of Beijing, China

We’ve all been there. It’s Friday evening, the office is packing up for the weekend, and the boss decides it’s the perfect time to announce something big. So, I hope you enjoyed your weekend of mulling over the idea of what a 100% tariff on all Chinese imports would look like.

This is a retaliatory tariff in response to Beijing’s rare earth restrictions, but this is bigger than trade drama. China is falling apart demographically, which will domino into everything else over the next decade (ahem, like exports). Whether China-US trade stops because of tariffs or demographics, it is coming soon.

In short, quitcha’ bitchin’ and get ready for a world without China.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is the 10th of October, and it’s just after closing time in Washington, D.C.. And right after everybody closed for the day, Donald Trump said that there’s going to be a 100% tariff on everything coming from China by November 1st, if not before, because the Chinese are putting restrictive, policies on their exports of rare earth materials, most notably to the United States. 

Rare earths are materials that are produced in trace amounts as a byproduct of the refining and mining of other metals, most notably, silver, lithium, copper. You basically have to take the concentrate that’s left over once you’ve gotten the primary stuff and then go through a series of refining steps that are very energy intensive and very polluting. 

And China has cornered that market. So they produce more than 80% of all of these materials. In some cases, it’s a functional 100% monopoly. Anyway, a lot of these materials help other properties emerge in more traditional things that I can be used very heavily in things like defense, materials. And so the Chinese have always found this to be a very useful pressure point. 

They’re also very much used in semiconductors. Anyway, the Chinese have restricted their exports. Trump has said no more and is now basically, saying that he’s going to double or more the tariffs that are in place. And that’s just the beginning. Okay. Now, before anyone makes this about trade or makes sort of Trump, I need to remind you guys of something. 

The Chinese are dying out. They already have more people aged 54 and over than 54 and under, and within ten years they will not have enough people under age 60 to run an economy. So it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter what your producer export or import. 

You need to assume that that trade relationship is going to go to zero. Doesn’t matter if you’re exporting soy or beef or semiconductors or ethane or anything. Zero zero is where this is going. It doesn’t matter what you import from China, whether it’s transformers or wire or process chemicals or fertilizer or anything. It doesn’t matter. It’s going to zero. 

The only wiggle room here is the time frame. Either the Chinese die out over the next ten years and it goes to zero, or the Trump administration puts into place and owners tariffs. And by November 1st, or maybe even before it goes to zero, either way it is going to zero. So everyone needs to plan for that happening. 

Does the time frame matter? Of course it matters. Would I like to have more time? Of course I would like to have more time. But to pretend that this is a purely political question that can be negotiated away is a fallacy. And if that is your position, you’re going to lose everything. So quit your bitching and start your planning for a world without China. 

Sooner or later.

Life After Trump: President JD Vance

ance speaking at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina; October 2024 | Photo by Wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JD_Vance#/media/File:JD_Vance_speaking_at_a_rally_in_Wilmington,_North_Carolina.png

Anytime we have a sitting US president that has exceeded the average lifespan, it’s a warranted endeavor to explore what happens after…they bite the dust. So, how would President Vance hold up?

It’s impossible to know exactly how a Vance presidency would play out, but we can draw on some historical parallels. Obama and JFK were junior senators just like JD Vance, so they would all have comparable levels of experience when entering the White House. However, Obama had a nice network of qualified advisors, Vance does not. JFK rose to the occasion during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so Vance could very well do the same in his situation.

Should this all come to fruition, any success will have to come from Vance himself. He surely won’t be getting any (meaningful) help from the circle Trump leaves behind.

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Transcript

Hey everyone, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Los Canyon. This is the famous jumble of Los Canyon. And yes, that is the trail behind me. If you can see it, your has got better eyes than I do. Anyway, today we’re taking a question from the Patreon crowd. Specifically, let’s assume that, 

Donald Trump being 80, does what 80 year olds dies and exit stage, right? 

What would a president JD Vance white House look like? The short answer is no idea. JD Vance is a junior senator. And so you never know, when he’s confronted with real world problems and actually, he’s in charge of something, how he’s going to react. 

But let me point out two things to you. We have two presidents who were junior senators who, became president and they kind of give us goalposts, guidelines. I’m not saying that he would turn out like either of them, but it’s really our only points of reference. The first is Barack Obama. Barack Obama, in my opinion, he’s going to go down in history. 

He’s one of the top ten worst presidents we’ve ever had. His problem was that he was so anti-social that he just didn’t want to have meetings with anyone, including his own cabinet secretaries. And so for eight years, we didn’t functionally have a foreign policy. We had very little domestic policy. We just had a bunch of speeches from time to time. 

The difference between JD Vance and Barack Obama is very simple. Barack Obama did build an independent coterie of people around him when he went to the white House, and then he was able to tap the Democratic Party for expertise to fill his cabinet. JD Vance doesn’t have that option. He was almost a no. One when Donald Trump picked him. 

So he has no independent followers, especially followers who have, skills that could be applicable to governance. And Donald Trump is absolutely destroyed. The Republican Party as a source of talent. So if he were if JD Vance were to become president, he would become president alone with no one around him except for the people who used to hang on to Donald Trump. 

And as we’ve seen from the people who hang on to Donald Trump, most of them are not particularly competent in their chosen fields. So it could be ugly. The other option is JFK junior senator, was at best a mediocre president. Maybe if he hadn’t been killed, it would have turned around. Who knows? But something to keep in mind is the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

One of the reasons that the Soviets pushed when they did is because they thought the American president was weak. A lot of us probably did at the time. And lo and behold, JFK had nerves of steel. And the Cuban Missile Crisis was more or less resolved to America’s, long term advantage. So we can’t rule out that J.D. Vance has it in him somewhere. 

But just like JFK, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen because of J.D. Vance. It will not happen because of the circle of people he surrounds himself with, which makes it overall a risky bet.

A Break for Ukraine

Ukraine solider on a armored vehicle with a split screen of Donald Trump

President Trump might finally be throwing the Ukrainians a bone, as the US may begin providing the precision targeting intelligence for strikes deep inside Russia. This marks a major shift in US policy on Ukraine.

Let’s zoom out first. For decades, US presidents would avoid actions that could spike global energy prices. Well, that held true through Trump’s first term and until Biden left office, but Trump 2 has shaken things up.

The erratic policy implemented by the Trump administration has been hard to follow, but the Russians have gotten more favorable treatment so far.

Things now seem to be shifting. Trump realized that Putin had been playing him this whole time, so Trump may finally be switching up policy. Couple this pivot with Ukraine’s recent strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and we could see Russian oil exports crippled very soon. This means Russia’s main source of funding for the war would quickly dry up. Places like China and Iran will have to decide if they want to bankroll Moscow without any incentives…

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Transcript

Good morning, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about what’s going on in Ukraine and with the Trump administration. The new news is that the Trump administration. Well, let me rephrase that. Donald Trump personally, says that fairly soon the United States is going to be providing the Ukrainians with precision, targeting information. 

For the Russian energy system deep within the Russian Federation itself. Now, there’s a lot of back story that got us to this point. So let’s handle that before we move forward. The US administration, not just this one, all of them going back at least until the 70s. I’ve always been a little paranoid about energy prices as result of just the nature of economics. 

Energy demand tends to be inelastic. If you need a gallon of gas to get to work, and the price of gas goes up by 100%, you still need a gallon of gas to get to work. So it tends to be something that is very politically sensitive. And as a rule, political leaders, presidents are unwilling to do things that they know. 

We’re going to drive up energy prices. Now that relationship has loosened quite a bit in the last 20 years, largely because of the shale revolution in the United States, which has taken the United States from the world’s largest oil importer to the world’s largest oil exporter, which has some interesting effects on lots of things. But that general feeling remains. 

Now, back during the Biden administration, the Ukrainians started targeting Russian energy assets, most notably refineries, in an attempt to disrupt gasoline and diesel deliveries. The military tends to use diesel. The civilians tend to use gasoline. The idea was if we can stop the fuel flows, the Russians will be able to prosecute the war as much. In addition, the Russians don’t have a lot of storage, so if they can’t process fuel, they have a limited export capacity. 

And that means that they will have to shut in some production. Well, the Biden administration shut that down because they were afraid of the impact that it was going to have on global energy prices, which is not a ridiculous point of view, but I still think it was wrong because the shale revolution has changed of that. But the previous administration really didn’t understand petroleum energy economics, so I can’t say I’m shocked. 

That was the conclusion that they came to enter the Trump administration. The Biden administration was pretty pro Ukraine there just a few things they didn’t want him to do, like targeting energy. The Trump administration has been very erratic. In the early days, they were pathologically hostile to the Ukrainian government, up to and including inviting Zelensky to the white House just so they could yell at him. 

And relations. I don’t want to say they’re in the deep freeze, but they have not been great. Trump, as part of his reelection campaign, tried to convince everybody that he and Putin were best bros, and all it would take was one conversation between Trump and Putin for the war to end. Which, of course, was always really incredibly stupid because the war is happening for geopolitical reasons. 

And the only people think that the Russians invaded because Biden was president are Trump the people around him and some MAGA hardcore folks is the Russians think it’s hilarious that they’re actually Americans believe this. It’s a strategic issue. It’s a demographic issue. The Russians have been pushing towards the Carpathian since the 17th century. It didn’t change because of who was in the white House anyway. 

The Russians have gone out of their way to denigrate the American president, to make fun of them, to call them stupid. In the Kremlin, behind closed doors in European venues with the Chinese. But that information, as a rule, doesn’t make it back to Donald Trump, because Donald Trump has this really weird quirk. He feels that he has to be the smartest person in the room, and he likes to talk a lot. 

So what that means is he has gutted the top of the national security and foreign policy staff to make sure there’s no one ever in the room with him that could tell him something that he doesn’t want to hear, or would make him not appear to be the smartest person in the room, which means he’s basically gutted it completely. 

He’s not using the State Department. He’s not using the National Security Council. He has, however, installed a woman by the name of Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National intelligence, and she has gone through the CIA and the other intelligence bureaus and basically gutted them of the Russian experts, top to bottom. And she’s also the person who has the final say in what goes into the Presidential Daily Brief. 

So she makes sure that anything that makes the Russians look bad doesn’t actually make it into the brief. For example, Putin laughing openly on TV about Donald Trump’s stupidity. Anyway. 

Will this time be different? Because we’ve had lots of periods where Trump has got an inkling that something is wrong, and then Tulsi Gabbard has talked him down, or Putin has talked him down. Maybe, and the reason is because there’s another personality involved and this person is absent or his name is Steve Wyckoff. Now, if you remember back to Trump one, Jared Kushner was all the big deal, smart guy, basically served as a presidential envoy and actually got a few things done. 

For example, the Abraham Accords, which is the sum of the total peace deals between the Israelis and some of the Arab states. Kushner wanted nothing to do with Trump, too. he saw how the sausage was made from the inside. And Trump won. And he and his wife, who is Trump’s daughter, just bugged out. 

And so it’s the dumb sons that are actually in the white House now. Anyway, I’m getting I’m getting off track here. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Wait, wait. Cough. So, what? Cough has no foreign policy experience. And Trump basically entrusted him with the entire portfolio for all negotiations all over the world, all of which have gone really badly. 

So when Wyckoff shows up at the Kremlin, the Russians sit him down. They tilt his head back and they pour gallons of Russian propaganda down his throat. He goes Ben back to the white House and vomits that up in front of, the president of the United States. And that becomes gospel. And that is the primary reason, combined with Tulsi Gabbard, as to why we’ve really seen no movement. 

But things have changed recently because a couple months ago, if you remember there was a summit directly between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and it was supposed to last for several hours, and it was over very, very quickly. Putin thought he had Trump completely wrapped around his little finger. And if you look at policy from the last six months, that’s not exactly a shock. 

But Trump finally realized that this guy had been laughing at him for the whole time. And we started to get Trump looking at other bits of information like, I don’t know, media or talking to his wife. And he started to realize that he had been played the fool and that he was acting like a fool, and that perhaps the only way to change things was to change policy with a wild idea, I know. 

So we now have this, potential change in policy. The Ukrainians have started targeting Russian energy infrastructure again. Again, mostly going after refineries, but going after some pipeline places. And they’ve probably now reduced Russian refining capacity by 25%, which is the most it’s been offline since the Russian collapse back in the 1990s. The post-Soviet collapse. If if the Trump administration actually does what it’s talking about doing US satellite guidance combined with the weapons the Ukrainians already have, would be capable of targeting individual pumping stations anywhere in western Russia. 

And the Russians export about 5 million barrels a day through their various methods, about two thirds of that going out through the Baltic Sea, in the Black Sea, which are all within range of Ukrainian weapons. If you take out just a couple of the 

pumping stations per pipe, those exports go to zero. Now the Ukrainian thinking is if you do that, you basically destroy what has been Russia’s number one income source for the last 30 years. 

Oil exports. And then countries like Iran and China, which have been taking money from Russia and sending them drones and drone parts, will have to decide whether they want to directly subsidize the Russian government’s war in Ukraine. I find that unlikely. Iran is really in some dire straits right now. They need the currency. 

They don’t want to treat Russia as a charity case. And the Chinese, that’s probably a bridge too far, no matter how bad relations with the United States happened to be. So if that happens and the Russians have to fight on their own, it doesn’t mean that the war is over. But it means you have a catastrophic shift in fortunes on both sides. Will this happen? That’s entirely up to Donald Trump. 

He has changed his mind by my math, 77 times since January 20th. Who knows? But once the Intel is provided, for every day that it is there, the Ukrainians will definitely be striking. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians over the last year have been building up their drone capabilities, and we’re now regularly seeing attacks that use hundreds of drones on each side. 

You combine that with the precision targeting information, much less Western weaponry, and you can have a really dramatic change in the course of the war in literally a matter of days, and we may about be there.

A Rare Sign of Life in Congress

The dome of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

It looks like there’s finally a sign of life coming from the Senate chambers. After years of ceding power to the executive branch, a handful of Senators seem to have finally taken a stand.

Senators have given the Trump administration a very long rope; I mean, just look at some of the unqualified figures that got Senate confirmation. However, Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics has led us to the end of that rope.

Several Republican senators refused to even meet EJ Antoni, much less vote to confirm him. Unsurprisingly, the nomination of EJ Antoni was withdrawn on October 1. While I don’t want to oversell this one instance, it is a promising sign of life in an otherwise sleepy and knee-bent Congress.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Happy sunset from Colorado, Peter Zeihan here. And today we’re going to talk about Congress because apparently something interesting is finally happening there. For those of you been following me for quite some time, you know that I’ve been broadly disappointed with Congress for over a decade. Basically, the senators and especially the House have outsourced all their responsibilities to the executive branch and just turned into, a general scream shop, not even a talk shop. 

We haven’t really had meaningful legislation that hasn’t originated in the white House in quite some time. And a lot of that has been, let’s just call it subpar. Anyway, these trends really came to a head in this new administration. Trump two, where the Republican Party, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists as the institution that it used to be. 

It used to be a place where young leaders would be trained up, where people could not just be indoctrinated but actually taught to lead. And there was a policy arm within the institution to generate the sort of people who could then serve as advisers and even cabinet secretaries over the long run. When Trump ran for reelection this most recent time, he took over the party and basically got rid of all of that. 

So there’s no new generation waiting in the wings or is no longer a set of policy experts that he can draw upon. It is just now an institution that exists to service his personal needs, whatever those happen to be. And so the Republican Party, for all intents and purposes, is now gone. Now, that doesn’t mean that you get immediate turnover in Congress. 

And one of the things that we saw in the early months of the Trump administration, Trump two, again, is that Donald Trump would personally do a lot of arm twisting to convince senators to vote for his cabinet appointments for people who were really just deplorably unqualified. The big four, of course, are Pete Hegseth in defense, who continues to show over and over and over again that he doesn’t understand how an organization works much less a military. 

We have the DNI, director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who, if she’s not working for the Russians directly, certainly shares their worldview on all things American and continues to accidentally out spies. I think we’re up to nine now. We have let’s see. Kash Patel at the FBI, who is very charitably a, conspiracy theorist with absolutely no law enforcement, experience. 

And then we have, RFK Jr at Health and Human Services who is just a complete nutjob and has recently gotten Donald Trump to declare that he feels that Tylenol causes autism. Along with all kinds of other vaccine nonsense. Anyway, the point is that Trump leaned on the Republican senators in the Senate to confirm these people, even though they were wildly unqualified, and under normal circumstances, they would have never been nominated, much less confirmed. 

And there were a number of centrist senators who are really big on things like rule of law, who told the president, look like, you know, we’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt here. You’re the president. You just won. You have a cabinet that you want. We’re going to help you build it. But you’ve got to promise us that these people aren’t actually nuts, and they’re going to put some time in to learn their portfolios so that it’s not an utter disaster. 

Well, here we are a few months later, and it’s been pretty disastrous. Now, that’s kind of piece one of what’s going on. Piece two is something called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, US statistics are generally considered to be by far the best in the world. And almost all of the major countries out there try to model their statistics collection on what the United States does. 

But the only group that disagrees with that is the really hardcore MAGA, led by Donald Trump, of course, who feels that, BLS and US government statisticians in general have been lying about the statistics for years in order to make him look bad and make Biden look good. No evidence has ever been presented on this topic because there probably isn’t any, everyone else in the world still thinks US statistics are the best on the planet and throughout the business community. 

That is not exactly a controversial point of view. Anyway, Donald Trump fired the director of BLS a few months ago and decided that he wanted to put somebody who was much more pliable in that position. 

The person he selected is a gentleman by the name of E.J. and Tony. Now E.J. and Tony does have a PhD. He does have a background in economics, but nothing that has to do with data, nothing that has to do with labor statistics. And E.J. and Tony has been basically for several years now, hitting the airwaves as a kind of a social media star denigrating the blues and economists in general. 

And he’s made it very clear. I mean, you don’t have to really read between the lines on this one, that if he does get confirmed, he will go through and basically rip up the entire system and just start making up statistics to make Donald Trump look good. So, 

if you’re not a hardcore MAGA and you’re not in the white House and you’re not part of the Heritage Foundation, which is where E.J. and Tony is, has been chief economist. 

This is not a guy that you want. No one else has come out to endorse him. Heritage Foundation. Well, that’s a sad story. It used to be a really solid conservative think tank 15 years ago, but it’s basically denigrated into MAGA world right now. And now it’s all about conspiracy theories. Anyway,  diAntony is disliked. 

Like basically everybody in the community, community mean people who can do math. And he’s basically described as a social commentator who happens to have a PhD, not someone who’s a statistician or an economist. Well, the interesting thing that happened October 1st is the Trump administration withdrew his nomination. Now, the really curious thing is why they did that. 

The reports out of Congress is that there are a number of Republican senators who rolled over for people like RFK Junior and Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, who refused to even meet with them. Tony. Apparently, got to the point where enough is enough, and Congress is actually, at least at some level, starting to consider actually doing its job as an independent branch of government. 

Now, I don’t want to oversell this because this is one event, albeit a very, very big one against a constellation of giving in, the, the personalities, in question are kind of up in the air, but probably the big three are Murkowski of Alaska and Collins of Maine and Grassley of Iowa, all three of which are very big on rule of law issues. 

But if it was just those three. He could have still been confirmed because the Republicans have a majority and Vice President JD Vance could always go in and flip the switch to break a tie. So it has to be more and it probably has to be more than 1 or 2 more in order for us to be in a situation suggesting there’s at least a half a dozen Republican senators who have said, no more. 

And that, for me, makes this a very good day.

America’s Generals Gathered for…That?

Official government photo of Pete Hegseth

It appears Trump and Hegseth have been getting the Led out, because the song ‘Ramble On’ pretty much summarizes how their speeches went the other day.

With America’s generals gathered, I was worried that Defense Secretary Hegseth and President Trump would make some dangerous comments or announcements. While they both managed to make everyone seriously uneasy, it was more mush than alarming.

Hegseth focused on culture-war themes. Trump rambled about God-knows-what, with a few coherent sentences that the teleprompter fed him. But both speeches highlighted the lack of strategy and alarming drift of US military leadership.

Don’t believe me? We are including the text of the speeches so you can enjoy the fun yourself.

Link to Hegseth’s speech

Link to Trump’s speech

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. This is a topic I was hoping to avoid, but so many people have written in on the Patreon page, and I feel like I kind of have to. Today’s the 1st of October. Yesterday was the 30th September. And, yesterday was the day that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the US president, Donald Trump, addressed the entire coterie of American generals who were flown in for the speeches. 

Honestly, it reminded me of, Gaddafi of Libya or Fidel Castro of Cuba in their later decades when they would stand in front of an audience, says blah, blah, blah about nothing for hours. There didn’t seem to be a point to the speech at all. And the day before, two days before, when Trump was talking about putting himself on the agenda, he said something along those lines. 

Isn’t it nice that so many people are coming from so far away? But Secretary of Defense ordered them to come. This wasn’t a social call. 

I was originally very much dreading the speech. I was expecting perhaps a really dark turn in American form and strategic policy. Luckily, we did not see that, which is not mean that there was anything that happened to the speech that makes me feel good. I just that sense of dread I was feeling is no longer there. So, let’s start with Haig stuff, because that was the more substantive context. 

And then we’ll move on to, Donald Trump, because of, least qualified defense secretary in American history. His words, not mine. I just happened to agree with them. He said them during his, confirmation hearing. He actually said somebody who doesn’t know anything about the sector whatsoever, if they were to go in, could actually do better, than any of the secretaries of defense that we’ve had since World War two. 

He has proven that to be lovely, inaccurate. At this point, most of his speech was spent on the culture war. Basically, it was like he was giving a long monologue back from when he was on Fox News as a correspondent. Very, very short version. He made it very clear that any sort of protections that existed for any sort of group, whether it’s women or blacks or whatever, they were all going away, the physical requirements for anyone who is in a combat role will be based on men, which basically will exclude, 80 to 90% of women who are already serving from continuing if these policies are instituted. 

Keep in mind that the United States is going through demographic decline and the single largest growth unit in terms of recruitment for the military for the last half decade has been women, especially as we move to a more technical military. So by establishing these criteria, we’re basically guaranteeing that we’re not going to be able to hit our, recruitment numbers, and it’s going make hitting the technical numbers very, very difficult. 

Probably what this will mean is the United States will have to take a page from what it did during the war on terror, specifically in Iraq, and start playing, six figure salaries to contractors because we can’t generate the staff that is necessary. So from a strategic technical, recruiting, equity and especially warfighting capability, these pieces are just a series of horrible ideas. 

He also made it very clear that all of these generals who have decades of experience, if they don’t like it, they can quit, which is, you know, how it’s supposed to go with policy. But he was kind of rude about it. Anyway, I spoke to a number of people who were in the room, and, let’s just say that Secretary Hegseth is not exactly well respected because there’s a lack of credentials. 

And, well, some secretaries, like, say, Secretary Rollins in agriculture came in not knowing much, but really put her nose to the grindstone in order to school herself up on the issues in play. Hegseth has done nothing like that. He hasn’t even built a senior staff yet. So he does a lot of proclamations like this speech today or yesterday. 

And then he goes and does some social media or maybe pumps iron with the troops, because that’s what a secretary of defense is apparently supposed to be. My favorite line from someone in the room was that, if Secretary Hegseth just wanted to remind us all that he was incompetent and not worthy of the position. He could have just done that in an email. So harsh. Then Donald Trump. Oh, okay. So we’re going to append the full text of both speeches, Hegseth and Trump’s to you. So you can read this for yourselves. But oh my God. 

If I were to sum it up in one word, it would be bumbling. There were really only about three full sentences and an hour of him yammering on about loves lost and fights one, and how wife is one of his favorite words. And it was obvious when those three sentences came up because he was reading directly from the teleprompter. 

In his opening paragraph, he said, you guys can do whatever you want. You can laugh, you can cry, whatever. Of course, if you leave the room, then there goes your career. Super inspiring. Dude. There were no policy announcements. There was no strategic guidance. There was really no reason to be there. aside from the fact that he had a captive audience, and from what I heard from the people who were in the room, everyone was just sitting there. 

Stone faced the whole time because it wasn’t even a political speech. It was just rambling and the line of somebody who shared it with me that really got me was like, if the president wanted to highlight to us that he was no longer capable. Mission accomplished. I’ll let you read the speech yourself. I’ll let you decide for yourself. 

The one item that did perk people’s ears up is when the president said that he was considering using American cities as proving grounds for the US military. There is not a successful country in human history that has done that. Because once you turn the defenders of the nation on the citizens and the social contract is broken, and you need something new that is based on fear, that is the downfall of the Roman Empire and the Hittites and the Byzantines and any number of things since you keep your internal security forces and your external security forces separate at all costs and yes, yes, yes, Portland annoys me too. 

But the idea that you’re going to use Chicago or Nashville or anything else as a training ground, no, it was almost as if the president was daring the assembled generals to carry out their oath to defend the constitution of the country from all foes, foreign and domestic. And I am not comfortable with where this might lead. About the only thing I can say about it is that this was one of those bumbling passages that was made in passing, that was not the centerpiece of the speech. 

It was one line amongst a lot of mush. 

I don’t think anyone walked out of that room encouraged by their leadership or the current state of military policy. But considering some of the things that we have seen in military and strategic policy in the last few months, I still count this as a win.

Why Trump’s Stance on Canada Makes Sense

Canadian flag flying over Parliament

The Trump administration’s tough stance on Canada isn’t as novel (or as arbitrary) as it may seem.

The US has always been cautious with neighbors on the northern border, from Britain in the past to modern Canada. This view follows the long-standing US strategic view that an independent power on the northern border could pose a security risk.

That caution is wise and should be applied to any potential economic integration as well. Merging the US and Canada might sound nice, but when you lift the hood…not so much. The US would be stuck with the financial burden of caring for Canada’s rapidly aging population.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Hello. From Rock Island Pass at the border between the Hoover Wilderness and Yosemite National Park. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon crowd as we’re doing this whole trip. What what what what why? Why is the Trump administration hit Canada so much? Is there anything to it or or should we just whinge? That’s actually the specific text of the question. 

Let’s start by saying that there is is something to it and it goes beyond her. The Canadians burning our Capitol, back in the War of 1812. And you Canadians, you cannot pledge innocence from this. You know you did it. Yes. The Brits drove the car pool, but it was Ontarian Abrines that brought the torches to the party and actually burned the white House down. 

Now bigger picture. The United States is a large country that basically has the best parts of the continent. But that doesn’t mean that the United States is alone on the continent. Obviously, Canada is the entire northern frontier and throughout American history. If you go back to before reconstruction, the United States was always concerned that an extra hemispheric power would establish a beachhead somewhere in the vicinity of the North American continent and potentially use it to interrupt American power or maybe even launch an invasion. 

And of course, most recently and from the beginning, actually, Great Britain was the power of concern. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that there was a British invasion imminent or anything like that. Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m going to piss off enough people with this video as it is. But the idea that you can have an independent power right on America’s borders that doesn’t bear some degree of security risk is just silly. 

That doesn’t mean that I think that there’s a war around the corner, that it’s even inevitable. Certainly not imminent, but it’s not a blind policy decision to decide that you actually want all of the continent under a single flag. And both it for those of you to the south of us in Mexico, this applies to you as well. 

Now, that said, I think that the borders between the United States and its neighbors are fine. I’m not worried about an invasion. There’s good buffers, whether it’s, lakes and force in the north or deserts and mountains in the south. The population density of Canada certainly couldn’t do it by itself. Mexico maybe a little bit better. But northern Mexico is such a logistical snarl because of a lack of infrastructure. 

That too, I’m not concerned about. But the bottom line is, is that this didn’t come out of nowhere. This has been part of the American strategic view for 200 years, and to pretend otherwise is being a little bit windy. Now. That said, do I think we should do it? I think candidate even if they ask. No, because it’s bad math. 

When industrialization really got going roughly a century ago, people started moving from the farms and into the cities and they started having fewer kids. And that process was much more intense in Canada than it was in the United States, because I don’t know if you knew this, but can it gets cold in the winter. And so the Canadians basically huddled together in their cities for warmth, and there’s a much higher dense urbanization rate. 

Oh, got a message dense urbanization rate for Canadians than there is for Americans, which means that the Canadians of age are much slower. They’ve also probably played the immigration card as hard as they can. It’s starting to generate social disruption. And so the old Trudeau government and the new government have cracked down on immigration. Quite a bit, basically slowed it to a trickle. 

Oh, Mr. Popular, all of a sudden, which means that Canada is aging much, much, much quicker than the United States. And remember, in the United States, the baby boomers are already two thirds retired. So we know we face an explosion in social welfare payments over the next decade. Canada is ahead of us, and Canada lacks a millennial generation of size comparable to what we have south of the border. 

Which means if we were to do a merger of the Canadian provinces and the American states, it would be up to the United States to pay for the retirement of most Canadian citizens, most notably in Ontario, Quebec, and in the maritime provinces where the demographic decline is most advanced. So from a purely financial point of view, merging the two countries would be economic suicide for the United States. 

Let Canada pay for this. And if that means Canada pays for other things too, great.

While I Was Gone, Part 4: US Security

Shield of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

To wrap up this short series on things that went down while I was away, we’ll be looking at some alarming developments in US security.

The FBI raided former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s home and office, under accusations of mishandling classified documents; that’s a bit rich coming from the current administration, but I digress. The bigger issue is that using federal law enforcement as a political weapon mirrors authoritarian states like Russia and China. This relates to the other big news, where Trump has ordered the US military to form specialized units for patrolling American cities; this is just all-around bad policy.

If there was a time for Congress to assert itself as the adults in the room, it would be now.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks. This is the last in our series of. What the hell were you thinking while I was gone? Was I backpacking for two weeks? And the world kind of fell apart. This time we’re going to talk about security in the United States borders. There are two big things that went down when I was gone, both of which concern me greatly. 

The first involves a gentleman by the name of John Bolton. John Bolton was a national security adviser, which is kind of America’s top foreign policy coordinator during the first Trump administration. But after seeing how the sausage was made inside, he left the administration and basically became a critic and has now been one of the more reliable voices for saying when Donald Trump is doing something that perhaps isn’t the brightest. 

Well, while I was gone, the FBI was ordered to raid his business and raid his personal residence. And he has now been accused of improperly handling classified materials. The hypocrisy of this is pretty rich. Anyone who is, like, independently minded will be able to tell in a second that the Trump administration is the least information secure administration we’ve ever had. 

We’ve already had a number of cabinet ministers, up to including the vice president, included in signal checks, which is a Russian penetrated not particularly secure platform in which they shared operational data. We’ve had situations most recently in the, the Alaska summit where informations and the personal information of security and diplomatic personnel, including their contact information, was just left on a printer. 

And we’re seeing a general disregard for all the counselor generals, assuming they haven’t been fired already, which are the people who are supposed to maintain information security within the administration. So this administration is leaking classified information massively. We even have our DNI who’s in charge of the intelligence system. Outing covert covert agents around the world on Twitter. 

And so to accuse Bolton of doing something inappropriate with documents is is really rich, especially since he has been in government service in this sort of role for over 20 years and has never even had a hint of that concern brought up, ever. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons to not like John Bolton. Mostly political or personal. 

He’s not a particularly nice gentleman, but no one has ever accused him of not being competent. So that’s number one. Using the FBI as a hit squad for political opponents, is something the United States has never done. This is right out of modern China or 2000s. Russia, or maybe a Latin American democracy. This is not a great thing. 

The second thing which actually concerns me even more is what’s being done with the military. The US military is designed to do military operations overseas. They’re designed to kill people and detect threats. But Trump has given the order for the military to form specialized units designed to specifically patrol and pacify American urban centers. Now, the US military is not good at law enforcement, and it has never been trained to be good at law enforcement. 

Third thing is to get in a tank or getting a jet and go overseas and do things there. When you put them into a law enforcement role, like we saw, say, in the Iraq occupation, things go to hell really quickly. Their equipment’s not right for the training is not right for it. It’s a mismatch. And so a lot of people died that probably didn’t need to. 

You take those same people and you put them on American soil and tell them to do law enforcement. And we’re in a very different situation. The only governments in modern history that use their military for urban pacification are those countries where occupying their own people is a national security issue. This is Iran. This is, to a degree, Russia. 

This is to a degree, North Korea. This is not something we want to see. Not only would it be violent, not only will there be a lot of political degradation because of it, not only will this erode the US military’s capacity to function. It is by far the most expensive way that you could possibly do it, because you’re taking people that you’d like to say trained to work on an Abrams tank. 

It’s people that you probably cost at least a quarter of $1 million just to do their training and then beaten them. Beat cops? No. So we have this cascading list of economic and social and political and health and national security military issues that just in the last two weeks have taken an absolute nosedive. 

I’m not a call to action guy, but we’re nearing the point pretty quickly where if Congress cannot find a backbone to re inject some sanity into American policy, we’re going to be having some severe degradations in our economic, social, and military models that are literally going to take us decades to unfuck. This is getting very real.