The TikTok Ban Is (Almost) Here…One Year Later

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A little over a year ago, we discussed a potential ban on TikTok in the US. Well, President Biden finally signed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”, which would ban TikTok or force its parent company, ByteDance, to sell it.

You can bet that TikTok won’t go down without a fight, so we’ll probably still be talking about this a year from now…but the video below is a little reminder about why I’m not torn about this ban.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Will RFK Jr. Shake Up the 2024 Presidential Election?

Most of you have seen my previous video outlining how I see the 2024 US presidential election playing out…click here if you need a refresher or if you haven’t seen that yet.

RFK II has a presidential name, but I don’t think he’ll be finding himself in that position this go around. However, he does have the opportunity to cause some problems for Trump in the process.

Donald Trump has created enough challenges for himself by dividing the Republican party and alienating independents, but RFK Jr. might be able to add one more challenge to Trump’s campaign. We all know the conspiracy theorist wackadoos love Trump, but RFK Jr. is catching the eyes of some of the crazies.

While this group isn’t going to win either of these candidates a seat in the oval office, there’s potential for some of Trump’s strongholds to be split with RFK Jr. The impact to President Biden will be fairly limited, as the remainder of those bearing the Kennedy name support the current President.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we are going to take another entry from the Ask Peter Forum. this specifically regards the election, specifically about Robert Kennedy Jr and whether his entrance into the race is going to cost Biden a potential victory. let’s start by giving you the quick and dirty of where I see this election going. 

number one, Donald Trump has broke the unity of the Republican Party. There are fewer Republicans and Democrats at any given time. And so if the Republicans don’t have unity, it’s almost impossible for them to win the general election. And so if you have a situation where maybe upwards of a third of registered Republicans are just like, not interested in this guy, it’s almost impossible to envision a scenario where Trump can walk away with a victory. 

The second problem was with the independents, and I’m talking about the real independents. So in the American legal system, about 25 to 30% ish of the population are hardcore Democrats or hardcore Republicans. And then another 15 to 20% on each side say that they’re independent. But they really vote either Republican or Democrat over 90% of the time. So they’re really not independent. 

That just leaves the 10% in the middle. And one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why no American political pool poll ever taken before the political conventions has ever been right is because when you call a real independent before the conventions, they just hang up on you. so ignore all the polls that are out there right now. 

Anyway, in the midterm elections, which everyone seems to have forgotten two years ago. Trump backed candidates were gutted by real independents, and very few of them won at all. Donald Trump has basically told the independents that the only vote that matters is the primaries, not the general. And since the general is the only place where the independents have a voice, they broadly turned against Trump, or at least they had as of two years ago. 

We’ll see what happens this time around. Well, here’s the problem. There are fewer Republicans and Democrats. So not only would Trump have to carry the Republicans challenge, he also has to carry the independents, who he’s deeply offended in many levels. so unless something changes significantly, there isn’t a road to victory here for Trump. The question, of course, is whether or not RFK will shake that up a little bit. 

And I think it will, but probably not in the way that people are thinking. first of all, people like the idea of the name Kennedy. If you’re on the left, if you’re a Democrat because of, you know, John Kennedy and all that good stuff. the problem here is his own failed his disowned him on this topic. 

  

It was, just in early April that a dozen prominent Kennedy members, including former legislators, including half dozen of RFK Jr’s own siblings, showed up to campaign for Biden and campaign against their own family member. he’s definitely the black sheep of the family. He is. How do they put it? Loved but not liked. and so it’s really hard for me to see any classical Democrat, going with him just because the name, especially when the name is campaigning against him. 

the second issue, of course, comes back to independents because they are where a lot of this electoral cycle will be decided. And if you are a true independent, one of those 10%, somebody like me and you are looking at who is on the ballot, Trump and Biden again, you’re like, oh, somebody give me another choice. And I can see that argument for twisting a few things in places where the margin is small. 

the problem is, is that this guy’s not much better. people like to say that, you know, we’ve got 280 year olds running, and whoever wins on their first day in this coming term, they’ll be the oldest president to set foot in the white House. And that is true. they’re octogenarians, but RFK Jr is a set the generic. 

And so it’s not like he’s like the young chicken coming in from the side. I mean, this is no John Kennedy. which brings us to the third possibility that it could affect things on the Republican side. And I think that is far more realistic. the defining characteristic about RFK Jr is not that he’s a womanizer and a drug addict, or Kennedy. 

It’s it is a conspiracy theorist. And if there is a conspiracy theory out there that involves vaccines or diseases or the Chinese or the Jews or slinkys or jello or the moon, he’s in, in fact, the Russian bot farmer has made a habit whenever they make up something fresh, they tag him because they know he’s going to shout it from the rooftops. 

The problem here for Trump is that Trump thought he had cornered the batshit crazy vote, and now it’s going to be split. So there are some places that we had kind of penciled in that were locked in red for this upcoming election that might actually be in play, because the core group that Donald Trump has courted to ride himself to power are the populace. 

And that’s the part of the country that tends to go for these conspiracy theories the most. So we might see some of the strongest supporters in some of the strongest counties and precincts, actually flipping towards RFK a little bit, and that would be more than enough to add to the other factors to make sure that Donald Trump doesn’t get back into the white House. 

Whether, of course, that makes you jump for joy or cry in your milk depends upon where you stand. 

A Faint Glimmer of Hope in the House of Representatives

The House of Representatives is looking like dysfunctional family as of late, and of course, the weird uncle stirring up the pot is the Greenpeace faction. Opposing nearly every bill that dares to exist, they’ve essentially halted all legislative proceedings.

Despite the need for aid to Ukraine, bulwark assistance for Israel and Taiwan, defense reform, entitlement reform and more, all were hearing from the House are a series of steady shrieks. However, we might be seeing some action very soon thanks to discharge petitions. A discharge petition, requiring 218 signatures, forces debates on critical issues and gives bills a fighting chance at being passed. Even if – especially if – the Speaker would rather the bill not see the light of day.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

What Power Do the Independents Have Over Trump?

The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

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

No proper discussion of American politics is complete without mentioning the Independents. While their voting patterns have been historically predictable, Trump has Independents shaking things up a bit.

I expect Independents to favor anti-Trump candidates this election cycle, and remember that those polls placing Trump way out in front aren’t accounting for the Independent voters. If this plays out how I think it will, Trump will have led his party through a hefty series of defeats…and some big changes will soon follow.

So, all those factions in the Republican Party will have to do a little soul-searching and come up with a post-Trump strategy. Republicans 55 and younger will be looking toward what’s next, but we’ll have to wait and see if it’s a centrist movement, an entirely new party or a new coalition.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

TranscripT

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from my covered prison, also known as the Home Office. And we’re to close out our three parter on the upcoming elections with a disco version of the forgotten middle child of American politics, the independents, and how they are going to be determining the outcome of this race and how they’ve really already made up their mind.

The key thing to remember about independents is that they’re not part of the rest of the process and as a result, they feel a little annoyed, a little left out, and they keep getting presented with this binary choice between two horrible candidates and they have to plug their nose and vote for someone. However, they don’t do it in the way that you might imagine that a normal balancing factor would where they look at all the pros and look at all the cons and talk about it among themselves, and then they have a very knee jerk reaction.

It’s very predictable. They’re flighty, they have buyer’s remorse, and they almost always vote against whoever they voted for the last time. And it goes pretty much like clockwork. So they voted to put Obama into the office and they voted to bring him out of the office when he was up for reelection. The same happened for Bush. The same happened for Trump.

They voted him in because he wasn’t Obama. And then they voted against him because he was Trump. And they’ve done this over and over and over over throughout American history. And it’s one of the reasons why you usually see really big swings in the midterm election where the ruling party tends to lose a lot of seats in Congress.

While that didn’t happen this last time, when we got to the 2021 elections, the independents on their exit polling indicated that they really disliked Biden, specifically his economic policies, and very specifically that those economic policies were very bad for independents in general. And yet And yet. And yet. And yet, instead of generating the red wave, which history suggests happens almost every single time, or sorry, the opposition wave, they instead voted to keep the Democrats in the majority in the Senate, and they handed the Republicans the smallest majority they have ever seen in the last 180 years in the House.

Since then, the Republicans have managed to winnow that down even further because they ejected a guy who was using campaign funds to pay for porn. And the Republican while the far right, if you want to call it that, the populist right, the moderate, caused such a ruckus within the Republican caucus, within the Congress that they basically ejected their own speaker.

They didn’t just get McCarthy out of the speakership. They convinced him to quit Congress altogether, shrinking the majority even more. Now, why did this happen? Well, it comes down to Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s position in that the January six protests were about the real democracy. The idea that the election was stolen from him, even though there’s absolutely no facts at all that supported that.

And we now have almost every candidate who’s even running for president against him on the Republican side now saying that publicly. Remember, not a single court case was won. No, no, no. Cases of voter fraud were found. And all that resonates with independents. Just doesn’t that resonate with MAGA and Trump? What Trump is basically telling the independents is that the general election doesn’t matter.

And all of the decisions that should be made on American leadership should be made at the caucus in the primary level where he will dominate. And that means if you are an independent, you don’t have a voice. And they’re like, the hell I don’t. And so they showed up for a midterm, something they normally don’t do, and they voted against their own perceived best economic interests to vote in candidates who were anti Trump.

So they’ve broken with the pattern that has held true for the last several decades. And since Donald Trump hasn’t changed his tune on what went down in his general election, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the independents are not going to either. Let me give you an idea of how this is going to play out. This map here is what will happen if the independents split their vote evenly among the Democratic and the Republican coalition candidates.

Joe Biden, Trump. You’ll notice that if you add up those numbers, you can see in the bottom left how it breaks down that the Republicans need to swing a fair number of independents. So a 5050 split doesn’t work for them. They need to garner at least two thirds, preferably three quarters of the independents, in order to switch a lot of these purple states to red.

That’s not what we’re going to see. More likely, what we’re going to see is a repeat of what happened in the 2022 by elections. It’s going to replicate itself in the 2024 general elections, and that’s something more like this second map where the independents brief 2 to 1 in favor of anti-Trump candidates and favor Democratic candidates. And if this is what goes down, Donald Trump will be leading his party to the second or third greatest electoral feat in American history.

Now, you may say, well, that’s not what the polls are saying. The polls are saying that Joe Biden is so unpopular that Trump is actually trending towards a direct victory in a lot of states. Keep in mind, independents don’t participate in polls and certainly not a year ahead of time. Any poll that is further out than two or three months from the election is probably crap anyway.

But one in which the independents have no vested interest in playing. So I would just kind of toss that out to the side. What happens after is what’s going to get really interesting here. So what do you watch for moving forward? Well, you got to watch the people. If you consider that folks from the national security in the business community and the fiscal conservatives really have never been warm to Trump.

In fact, many of them have campaigned against Trump and vice versa. If you look at the world from their point of view, when Trump leads the Republicans to a defeat in this next election, it will be five electoral cycles. Since they have had one of their people in the White House. That has got to trigger some soul searching and some assessment as to what’s next and if we’re going to get a split in either party, it is probably going to be the Republicans and it is probably going to be because of this legacy of defeat.

And that will most likely lead them to break away and do something else. Some may become Democrats, some may form a new centrist party. Some may lead a direct rebellion against Trumpism. But those are the people who have the agency and the most reason to seek something out. Now, folks like Mitt Romney have decided to withdraw from the fight and leave it to the next generation.

So we’re going to be looking for people predominantly under age 55 who are trying to find a new way to function in this sort of environment, because the alternative is to simply never be in power again. And if there’s one thing I know about politicians that is ever the goal.

The Breakdown of the Republican Coalition

The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

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

If you watched yesterday’s video, then you already know that Donald Trump has no shot at winning the general election (assuming he’s not DQ’d or in jail). Today, we’re looking at WHY Trump can’t get elected.

The US electoral system encourages two big-tent parties, comprised of various factions that rise and fall throughout the years. What the Republicans lack in numbers, they make up for in consistency and lack of conflict in the party (at least, they used to). The Democrats have the numbers but are incredibly inconsistent at the polls, and they fight like teenagers amid the “big change.”

Trump has introduced some unprecedented conflict into the Republican Party, and we’re seeing internal divisions among factions that have been historically aligned. With this Democratic-style conflict filtering its way through the Republican Party, the numbers just won’t work for Trump…and that’s before we even discuss independent voters.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the winter wonderland that is snowy Colorado. Today we’re talking about why Donald Trump has no chance of winning the general election, assuming he’s not disqualified, assuming that he’s not in jail. Okay, So you have to look at the way our electoral system works. We have a first past the post single member district system, which is a fancy way of saying that you vote for one person who is representing a very distinct geographic area.

It’s not like the Netherlands where you vote for a party. You’re voting for one specific person. And what that does is it encourages our parties to further to only be two of them and for them to be very big tent parties because they need to get that marginal vote more than whoever is running on the other side. It’s all about numbers of votes.

That’s one of the reasons why whenever we do get a third or fourth party that never lasts for more than one or two political cycles and then other parties fall out, we go back to the two. I’m not saying that can’t happen this time around, but we’re getting really late in the day for it to affect this election.

Maybe the next one. Anyway, first past the post. So if you’re going to have a big tent party, that means you’re going to have a lot of power centers, a lot of factions within each party, and those factions are going to rise and fall in political power as technology and geopolitics and social issues evolve. And we’ve certainly seen that in the last 30 years.

We’ve had hyper globalization, that we now have globalization. We’ve had the rise of the information economy and now social media. We’ve had the baby boomers being in their prime to the baby boomers now retiring in mass. We are going through one of these transitions. So it’s really important to understand where all the factions are, especially as related to each other youth in their own political party.

So, for example, Republicans versus Democrats, the Republicans have always had a numerical disadvantage because they just don’t have as many voters. They don’t have as many factions. You’ve got the pro-lifers, the military voters, the law and order voters, business voters, for example. And the reason that this faction, despite having fewer numbers than the Democrats, has always done relatively well, is because their issues in play typically don’t clash.

The pro-lifers really don’t care about business regulation. The business community really doesn’t care about military policy and so on. So you have a smaller coalition, but a very solid coalition, a very reliable coalition, and everybody shows up to vote every time. And so even though they don’t have as many members, you know what you’re going to get in each electoral cycle.

And if you can pull a few independents, you’re good to go. The Democrats have a different sort of system. They’ve thrown a very, very wide net indeed. And I’m oversimplifying here a little bit, but they basically a three part coalition minority is coastal, highly educated elites and organized labor. And the problem with that coalition is when you start running on the issues and talking about the specifics of policy during the campaign, it’s very difficult to have anything that all three of those factions agree upon.

So for example, those coastal educated elites, in order to get rid of racism, they started coming up with new terms to call people, which, you know, we usually call racist, but whatever. Anyway, next is my personal favorite has no root in any Latin culture. And something like 97% of Hispanics find it either pointless or a little offensive, but they tried to push it anyway.

And so you’ve got a split on social issues among those two groups. Another great example is the Green Revolution, which obviously the coastal educated folks are really big on. But the unions are not so much because most of those jobs are not going to be unionized. So whenever you get a candidate who is a little brainy and who runs on the issue, someone like Michael Dukakis or Hillary Clinton, you know, tries to make practical pledges during a campaign, you’re going to start a internecine fight and they’re going to have entire chunks of the Democratic electorate that just don’t show up at all.

And it’s very hard to win that way. What they need to win is a charismatic candidate who doesn’t really talk about anything real at all. And that’s why Barack Obama did so well. So this is the day that we have been facing for the last 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years. Now, under normal circumstances, the Republicans have an advantage here because there are very few issues that are wedge issues within their own coalition.

But what Donald Trump has done is shake it up the race and introduced a number of wedge issues, not just across society but across the Republican electorate. And we now have any number of candidates who are I don’t know if say that are in Trump’s pocket is the how about in Trump’s corner? There we go that really break up the decision making process for voters.

So my personal favorite or I love to hate the most was Tommy Tuberville, who for months this year prevented military promotions in order to get his way on abortion policy. Those are two factions military voters and abortion voters who never had anything to fight about before. And all of a sudden they’re at each other’s necks. He’s so little.

Trump has driven the business community out of the coalition because he basically doesn’t like it when people tell him no or when they say yes. But, Mr. President, he wanted the adoration. That was it. And so you have the business community that is now completely alienated from the social conservative voters. And in that sort of environment, the Republicans are facing a Democratic style cohesion contest.

The problem here is that the Republicans don’t have as many voters as the Democrats. And even if they pass the cohesion test, then they have to deal with all the other things that Donald Trump brings to the table. So they’re not going to have their entire coalition showing up if Donald Trump becomes the candidate and that means just on the numbers, there’s no way that Donald Trump can win.

And that’s before you consider the independents were to do that in a different video.

Trump’s Disqualification: How We Got Here

The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

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

As I recorded this video on January 6th – it was inevitable that we’d be talking about Trump’s involvement in the insurrection. Specifically, we’re breaking down the Colorado Supreme Court ruling disqualifying him from running for office. I’ll try to keep my opinions on this situation to myself, but Trump’s challenging of the state-level prerogatives is too ironic not to mention.

The root of the noise and chaos in our political system (Trump included) is a direct outcome of our efforts to reform the campaign finance system to reduce corruption. Instead of having solutions come out of backroom deals brokered over cigars, we now have a system full of loud, independent congresspeople who report to no one except folks they’re trying to raise funds from.

So when you hear an American politician say something incredibly stupid – whether it is Florida’s Matt Gaetz doing his Hateful Florida Man impression, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib spouting something wildly racist, Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren making up math, or Colorado’s Lauren Boebert saying…pretty much anything – keep in mind that you are not their audience, even if one of them is your representative in Congress. Each is pandering to a very specific NATIONAL demographic – what they’re looking for in return is not so much votes but instead money.

We’ll likely be left with a scramble from both political parties if Trump is disqualified, which means a more competitive and unpredictable election cycle. But we’re only getting started on this series, so tune in tomorrow for part 2.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is. It’s the 6th of January and I was going to try to ignore this, but I’m kind of in the same position as the Supreme Court. So here we go. Today, the US Supreme Court indicated that it would hear Trump’s challenge to Donald Trump’s challenge to a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that says that he can’t run because he is guilty of insurrection.

What’s going on here is that in the aftermath of the Civil War, a series of constitutional amendments were passed while the South were not present. And so when they receded under reconstruction, they had to adopt them. And among the clauses of those constitutional amendments was one. The Insurrection Clauses says that if you participated in any sort of uprising against the U.S. government, you are immediately disqualified from seeking office at any level in the U.S. government and back during the days of reconstruction, that meant that tens of thousands of people could never be in public service again.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled 4 to 3 that Donald Trump meets those criteria, and therefore he can never run for any office ever again. And they disqualified him. Trump obviously is challenging that ruling at the Supreme Court level. Now, the Supreme Court right now, our chief justice has gone by the name of John Roberts, and he has bent over backwards his entire professional career to not not, not, not, not make waves.

His theory of jurisprudence is that laws should be made by the legislators, whether at the state level or the Congress level. And it is the job of the court to have as light of a touch as possible because ultimately they weren’t elected. It was the legislators that were elected and they are the voice of the people. So the court should only rule when it doesn’t have a choice.

It should try to focus on the most technical of arguments rather than the political ones. But now that we have a former president that is basically challenging the law of the land for one of the states, the Supreme Court has no choice but to get involved. Now on the merits of the case, I’m not going to offer an opinion because I am absolutely not a legal scholar.

I will only point out two things. Number one, who runs for office, how that’s regulated, how elections are managed. That is all a state level prerogative. The federal government has nothing to do with that. The United States is a federal system, which means there’s a balance of powers and responsibilities between the national government, the state government, the local government.

And it says very clearly in the Constitution that it’s up to the states how they do things. So in Donald Trump challenging this, he’s basically saying that elections should be a federal prerogative and no one should be able to tell him what he can and cannot do. Now, that’s kind of funny. If you look back at the ideology of the Republican Party and the movement that Donald Trump has assumed leadership of and understand, that would take a big step back to kind of dissect the second piece.

If you’re looking for a real reason why we’ve gotten into this mess, it’s our fault because we tried to clean up politics over the last 25, 30 years. We had something called campaign finance reform. And the idea was that we need to know where the money is coming from. So then when it gets into the political system, it doesn’t overly color it or generate corruption in the old system.

Most of the political money that flowed through the system came from just a few thousand people, relatively wealthy people, folks that generally had a foot in business. And this generated a very slick ish, very schmoozer and yes, somewhat corrupt political system, because you would have people at every level of government who, to a certain degree, were beholden to someone in a suit.

Now, the people who were in the suits, as a rule, being in the business community, they cared about regulation, they cared about rule of law, they cared about economic growth. These are overall not bad things. But it did mean that they these folks who gave the money had the ear of a lot of politicians. And so what would happen is you’d have this kind of schmooze system where a lot of work was done in the back rooms.

Government moved forward and it generally was more interested in continuity and stability than radical change. It certainly didn’t want to burn down the structures in order to make a progressive change happen. It was all about things being done with a degree of responsibility, even if it wasn’t very clean. Well, with campaign finance reform, everyone all of a sudden had a limit for how much they could put into the political system personally, and it had to be reported.

And so we saw more and more people giving money, but at a much lower number. And at the same time, we were making that legal change. We had the information revolution and the start of social media. So the transaction costs for playing in the political system went from giving a few million dollars to a few thousand dollars to a few dollars whose transaction costs went to zero.

And so we’ve gone from a system where a small number of people are beholden to a bunch of folks with money who have an interest in running the system to a very different system where instead of thousands of donors, there’s millions of donors who have just given a few bucks each and that money flows instead of to a party to specific personalities and movements.

So we’ve gone from a schmoozing system that’s somewhat corrupt, that still get stuff done and believe in stability to a system where any politician can raise money on their own and they have a vested interest in screaming and burning the house down because it gets people to click and donate five bucks. Both of them are corrupt in their own way.

One was a lot more functional. I’ll leave it to you to decide which one’s worse. Now, how does that deal with what’s going on at the Supreme Court here? Well, the movement that Donald Trump has assumed command of you could call the states right group if you want to. The idea that the federal government should be shrunk and it should be up to the state governments to decide what happens.

But here, Donald Trump and his supporters are taking the exact opposite of that position, saying that the states shouldn’t have the ability to regulate the elections. That should come from the national level. It’s kind of ironic, but Donald Trump has never been known for being ideologically consistent. Now what happens next? What happens next is we’re all going to get really riled up because the Supreme Court said they’re going to make the ruling in the first half of February, which is in plenty of time for things to get moving before the Republican convention happens in March.

Now, the thing that comes here, the thing that’s really important is the convention itself. In the days before campaign finance reform, the political system was all at the state level. You’d have your Iowa Republicans and your Kentucky Democrats and whoever else, and each party would run their own states the way they saw fit. And then once every four years, they would come together.

The national convention, and jointly nominate and vote on to support a common standard bearer for the presidency. Campaign finance reform made that system a lock. The individual ability to raise funding changed. Now, that’s started with Barack Obama, you know, change. And he basically ran in parallel to his party and won the presidency without being beholden to the party.

Donald Trump, of course, came in and took that to the extreme and even to a certain degree, ran against his own party, not just for the nomination, but for the presidency itself. Well, folks, the states have lost their lock on that system, which means based on how the Supreme Court rules here, we’re going to have a scramble on both sides of the aisle because it’s clear that Donald Trump can’t run.

If that’s how this goes, then all of a sudden we are in a real election again. Joe Biden is wildly, wildly unpopular, and it doesn’t take much of imagination to find a non Trump candidate who might be able to beat him on the other side. Donald Trump is wildly, wildly unpopular and Biden can easily beat him. Deal with that in the next video.

So if we have a month to figure out where the real candidates are, it’s going to be a blitzkrieg with Donald Trump at the back of the room screaming the whole time. Alternatively, if the Colorado court ruling is in some way overturned and Donald Trump is allowed to run, he has zero chance of winning the presidency. But to explain that we’re going to need another video or two.

China-US Relations: What Did Xi and Biden Discuss

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This week at the APEC summit in San Francisco, President Joe Biden and Chairman Xi Jinping sat down for a long overdue meeting.

One unexpected twist is that Xi expressed a desire for peace and cooperation between the two countries. There are only three scenarios for why I can see this happening: Xi has lost his edge, his cult of personality has cut off the flow of information, detaching Xi from reality, or he’s trying to play puppet master with the US.

Again, let’s not dive too far down that rabbit hole because Xi was more concerned about the flowers at the hotel than any of the APEC discussions. However, we won’t have to wait long before the truth reveals itself…

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here comes to you from Colorado. Great news. Our sponsorship of Medicare has done very well and we’ve had a number of you call in with matching donations. So our original match was for $40,000 for the month of November. Dollar for dollar for whatever anyone sends in. So even if just a buck or two, it makes a big difference.

But we’ve now had sponsors come in for to increase of 40000 to 100000. And to give you an idea of specifically what this sort of donation is going to go for. In modern warfare, explosions are, you know, part of the process. So there have been a huge number of cranial and spinal injuries in Ukraine and people might be able to get away from the front and survive, but then they’re not going to be able to function unless they can get additional medical assistance.

And so other donors have provided Medicare with implants and spinal surgery kits that are worth $20 million on the open market that were just given to them for free. And the question is, how do we get this to Ukraine where it can do the good? And that’s where our campaign comes in. So, again, the first $100,000 is matched.

No donation is too small. Thank you for everyone who has buzzed in so far, over 2000 of you have already donated. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It’s really humbling to be part of this process and I look forward to seeing what the final number is at the end of the month. But until then, back to our regularly scheduled program.

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is the 16th of November and yesterday in San Francisco at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Chairman Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden finally had that long awaited summit. It’s the first time that a real leader has met with Xi in something like four years, and it was really our first read on how he personally is doing, whether he’s lost his mind to senility or he’s just so drowned in his own propaganda that he can’t function.

The result was, by many measures, fairly surprising. She was basically all friendly talking about how he didn’t want competition. You want to be a of the United States if you want to challenge the United States. I mean, it was basically peace, love and recycle. He sounded like a teenage camp counselor. Three theories that come from this which are going to shake out real quick into the fact, number one, he really has lost his mojo, in which case we’re going to see increasing breakdowns in decision making across the Chinese system as he basically goes bipolar, which could be entertaining but a little bit dangerous.

The other two scenarios had to do with the cult personnel that has formed. Has destroyed all challengers to the throne. There’s no local leaders or regional leaders that have stuff anymore. He’s gone through the bureaucracy in academia and business, and he’s purged the bureaucracy as well. So part of the problem the Chinese have been having of late is that no one will bring him new.

So he really is broadly unaware of what’s going on in his own country and across the world. And so when he is thrust into something like the APEC summit, things get a little weird. All of his staff apparently focused on the location of the table savings and the types of silverware and what flowers would be in the hotel.

And, you know, of course, I didn’t get to see any protesters, but it was all on the atmospherics and the design as opposed to the substance. There was very little prep on the Chinese side as far as we’ve been able to tell for what the actual topics of the day happened to be in. You know, there’s a few things going on right now.

So that kind of puts us into one of two categories. Number one. G Exposed to the world via San Francisco for the first time in years is like, Oh my God, what have I done? My country’s in demographic collapse. Our trade situation is dangerous. We are looking at national de dissolution over the next decade of stuff unless something just dramatically changes.

And every theoretical solution involves the United States in some way. We have to have their market. We have to have the security of our Navy grants, our maritime shipments. We have to have access to their finance markets, U.S., U.S., U.S., U.S. It has to be the U.S. And if he’s come to that realization, then a complete 180, from what we’ve seen over the last five years, makes a lot of sense.

The question is whether the cult came. They’ll push that down into the bureaucracy in the Chinese system when there are very few competent people left in that system. We will know the answer to that in a matter of weeks because the Chinese will stop being a bag of dicks like they have been for the last five years or things will change.

There’s it’s really pretty binary. The second issue is that it’s all lies, that this is all just part of Jesus internal play in order to wall the Americans in the false sense of security. Considering that the Biden administration has taken many more anti-China actions than the Trump administration has and has, unlike the Trump administration, codified them into law so they’ll outlast him.

That is a bit of a stretch to think that the Chinese could be that stupid. But considering the Chinese inability to function in most international forums of late and the destruction of the information transfer system within the Chinese system by Xi, it’s entirely possible that they are really that dumb and we will know the answer to that real soon too.

So one way or another, here we come.

Biden and Xi Meet at the APEC Summit

President Biden and Chairman Xi Jinping will have a private meeting at the APEC Summit in San Francisco. I’m not overly optimistic about getting any meaningful information out of this hospice meetup, but it’s better than nothing.

Thanks to the cult of personality established by Xi, getting a message to him is damn near impossible. At the very least, we’re going straight to the source this time, and we’ll get an opportunity to assess the current state of the Chinese leader.

So keep an eye out for some updates after this meeting concludes, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up for anything too exciting…

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

TranscripT

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Chicago. I am recording this on the 14th November. You’ll see it tomorrow, the 15th. The news today is that the APEC Forum, that’s Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation. It’s a forum that was set up decades ago to help with economic integration among the Asia-Pacific region is having their annual heads of state summit in San Francisco.

And everyone who’s everyone will be there but is important, that is. And, you know, whatever. The real issue is that there’s going to be a bailout, a real standalone meeting between China’s chairman, as you’ve been paying, and America’s president, Joe Biden. Now, there are any number of reasons why it would be a good idea to have a summit right now.

There’s big issues going on in trade and security. There’s the Ukraine war, there’s Gaza, there’s energy, this green transition. It goes on and on and on and on. Not I’d be very surprised if they actually meaningfully discuss any of those issues because there’s a much more basic problem, and that is China. China’s cult of personality that has gathered around Xi Jinping has now become so strict that information is not being exchanged in the country.

And XI is basically shot the messenger so many times that he has very little idea of what’s going on in his own country or the wider world, whether it’s power outages or remember that spy balloon. We now know that it wasn’t even aware of it until after the entire issue was over. So we have we the United States has tried on multiple occasions to meet with some of the uppity ups high up within the Chinese bureaucracy, city and state authority systems, and have discovered that really no one has reliable access to the chairman at all.

So, for example, Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin have both been to China to speak with their counterparts, only to discover that their foreign minister and their defense minister don’t actually have access to the chairman. It hadn’t for some time. And by the way, they both got fired shortly thereafter. So we’re sending in the only gun that’s bigger than SecDef and SEC State, and that is the president himself. So Xi and Biden will be meeting the day you see this, the 15th. And I’m not expecting meaningful policy addressing. So we’re just trying to find out if the guy has lost his mind at this point. Once you turn 60, you know, things start to go a little sideways and she is now 70.

And since no one except for, say, Vladimir Putin has had a meaningful access to Xi in years, this will be the first chance for the United States to judge whether the guy on the other side of the table still has his faculties about him. And luckily, the person who’s going to be judging whether or not the Chinese leader has failed because of age is Joe Biden.

So, you know, he knows what to look for.

The Future of Ohio: Manufacturing Growth and Political Shifts

If you’ve ever spoken to an Ohio State fan, you know that they’ll tell you how amazing they are without you asking. Unfortunately for all of us, I’ll be adding to their boasting list today because there’s plenty of success and growth in store for Ohio.

After years of stunted economic growth caused by the Jones Act destroying its manufacturing base, Ohio is ready to turn the page like Bob Seger’s hometown. As Ohio’s reindustrialization process kicks off, we’ll see plenty more projects like Intel’s semiconductor facility pop up throughout the state.

Ohio’s political stance has long aligned with national sentiment, and we’re now seeing the state shift toward populism. Between a political shift and Ohio’s manufacturing resurgence, it’s a safe bet that this state (and all those Buckeye fans) will continue to play a critical role in the country’s future.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from not Idaho and not Iowa, but Ohio. Iowa’s got corn and pigs and soy and insurance and Idaho has potatoes and wheat and the Snake River, Ohio excels at things like manufacture. Or at least they did. Ohio is one of the states has been really hurt by something called the Jones Act, which is something that bars cargo ships from transporting cargo between American ports unless the vessel is 100% American owned.

Captains built in 75% crude. It’s something we did in 1920 as part of the Interstate Commerce Act that absolutely destroyed the ability to move things on the water. And since Ohio is bordered to the south by the Ohio River, which is one of the world’s great waterways, and then the north by the Great Lakes, which are one of the world’s great waterways, Ohio is arguably the State of the Union that has suffered the most.

It also took a big hit because of globalization. Ohio is also the state that has arguably suffered the most from globalization because it had the economic geography that was excellent in terms of lots of flat land that was easy to build infrastructure on and a lot of legacy infrastructure from its industrial period. But with globalization and the United States basically elevated places that didn’t have very good geography as part of our plan to defeat the Soviet Union.

And that meant that places with subpar geography thinking here, Brazil or India or China were able to get a huge leg up. And that gutted a lot of the manufacturing base here. Now, Ohio is still a significant manufacturing player, just not as rich as there used to be. And part of the decline in the use of the waterways and because of globalization is part of the reason why Margo and Donald Trump have done so well in this state and why the state’s politics has taken such a hard turn to the populist right that is in the process of shifting maybe not the political stuff, but all the economic trends.

Globalization means that we need to rebuild a lot of industrial plants in other parts of the world, and all of a sudden geography matters again, and Ohio’s looking pretty good. Ohio is one of the healthier demographers in the advanced world, suggesting that it has a pretty robust potential workforce. And the state and the local governments here in the Columbus area have been very aggressive at going out, including the investment with the single biggest achievement they have been the intel facility that is just down the road here.

Intel is an American semiconductor manufacturer who was the world leader until about six years ago when they made a bad bet. They bet that this new thing called extreme ultraviolet lithography was just not ready for prime time. And they designed their chips using an older type of technology that’s much more expensive to operate and a lot more finicky.

But turns out that EUV actually was ready and the company that bid on or BET on it was TSMC, which is the semiconductor manufacturer out of Taiwan. So today, all the world’s best chips are basically made in Taiwan. And while Intel has designed some of the chips that TSMC makes, they don’t really mean facts for very many of their own.

Certainly not here in the United States. This new facility that’s under construction in Ohio seeks to change that. Specifically, they’ve got these two models called the 20 A and the eight A if works by 2025, they’ll be produced in this facility and they are sub five, even sub three nanometer, which will almost overnight elevate them to producing some of the world’s most advanced chips.

So far, $20 billion have been sunk into this facility, 2 billion of which is local and federal subsidies. And if Intel has its way over the course of the next decade, that number, 20 billion, will increase to a hundred billion. And that’s just for fabrication. That doesn’t include any follow on businesses that are likely to pop up from network effects, whether that is assembly or testing or light manufacturing to take these chips and put them in things that we use every day.

So the potential here for the Ohio region to grow is explosive, and that even assumes that we don’t do anything with the Jones Act. And if we do that, all the old manufacturer, it is likely to come back as well because you just can’t beat the local geography here for internal transport. So will that have political connotations? Probably delay and that’ll get really colorful, but we’re going to cover that in a different video.

I’m just outside Columbus today and we’re going to talk politics a little bit. We’ll use a link in this mail to give you an idea of where I generally think U.S. politics are going. But the general issue here today is we’re at an inflection point. Ohioans are proud that they’ve been voting for the winning side in almost every presidential election for over a century, with all the events in 2020 breaking their pattern.

And the reason both for it happening and the pattern break is Donald Trump. So before 2020, Ohio was the middle of everything middle class, middle income, middle and manufacturing, middle and services. It was very representative of the United States as a whole. So it was very easy to track the political winds based on what the Ohioans were thinking, but they did suffer quite a bit from globalization and something like the Jones Act, as you saw in the previous video.

And so there’s a lot of resentment in the state. And since Donald Trump basically ran on resentment and people who felt they had been left behind, Ohio switched and now is considered a generally populist conservative, socially area. However, if you remember some of my other work, you know that the political factions that make up the country are moving around basically the the American political system is made up of two very large parties because the electoral system forces that into form.

Basically, you have to get one more vote than the other guy in order to win the seat. And so therefore, you don’t want to alienate any potential voters. And in that sort of environment, you two huge parties that are made up of independent factions that shift around based on changes in economics, sociology, politics, demographics and in the last 30 years, we’ve had a lot of things go down.

We’ve had the rise of the baby boomers and now the retirement. We’ve had hyper globalization and now it’s end. We’ve had the rise of social media and the implosion of information transfer. And through all of that, the two parties held together until very recently. And in the Trump era, that relationship is breaking down. Now, Trump did a lot of things for a lot of reasons to a lot of people, but the ones that matter for this discussion is he elevated a faction known as the populist to power, and they are now the single largest voting bloc in the United States.

They’re very powerful here in Ohio. But in doing so, he drove away a number of more traditional factions. He would call them RINOs that include the entirety of the business community. But he was able to court other groups that are more socially conservative, people like the Catholics and the Hispanics over to his side. And as part of that process, there’s now a tug of war between the Democrats and the Republicans over the future of organized labor, where an organized labor is only become more and more powerful over the next decade because we need to build out the industrial plant.

And most of those jobs are blue collar, and we’re an environment of labor shortage. So we’re going to see more and more strikes. What this means is the business community and the labor community, which have traditionally been the two most powerful voting blocs in Ohio, are suddenly Sweden voters. So everyone got used to Ohio being the man in the middle and ultimately representing what we were all thinking.

We’re still there. It’s just that the two factions that matter the most are at the moment not part of the political process. So what we’re going to be seeing over the next few years between this massive re industrialization and buildout and this political shift is Ohio is still going to be the man in the middle. And where they come down is going to determine the shape of our political parties moving forward.

And we’re seeing those arguments across the Ohio political landscape right now with everyone engaged in everybody angry and everyone hopeful, all at the same time. So stay tuned. Watch Columbus. And they’re going to give us our first good taste of what our post-Trump party structure is going to be.

The Southern U.S. Border: Venezuelan Immigration

Today, we’re peeling back another layer of the U.S. immigration onion – Venezuelan immigrants. Since Hugo Chavez took power in the late 90s, Venezuela has been spiraling into a political and economic crisis, so fleeing the failing state is the best option. (The damage inflicted was so deep, and his successor so incompetent, that Chavez’s death didn’t help at all.)

These aren’t the typical low-skilled immigrants showing up at the southern border; these Venezuelans are highly skilled and educated. This begs the question – could this be the solution to the US labor shortage? The short answer is no, at least until immigration reform occurs.

But the long and treacherous journey these Venezuelans make isn’t for economic reasons; it’s simply to avoid starving to death in their home country. The dynamics of the southern U.S. border are changing, and Mexico’s role will also evolve.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from chilly Colorado, where fall has definitely set in. Today, we’re going to talk about the situation on the southern border as regards a very specific group of people, the Venezuelans. For those of you who don’t follow South America, Venezuela used to be one of the most advanced countries in the developing world with excellent health care, education and infrastructure.

But in 1988, a populist by the name of Hugo Chavez won an election and took the country down the path into populist desolation, complete with a gutting of the industrial base, the destruction of the oil sector infrastructure fell apart over the next 20 years, and as of three four years ago, the country actually fell into famine, which is just bonkers because this is a country that used to export about 3 million barrels a day of crude and be a significant food exporter as well.

Today, well, as of the first of the year, oil output had dropped down to nearly a half a million barrels a day. They’ve increased that by maybe a third to half. At this point, well, but they import over 80% of their food. And while they’re in a bit of an ideological war with the United States, most of that food comes from the United States via Colombia, which is a country that the socialist ideologues in Venezuela say that are their enemies.

Anyway, the whole place is falling apart. Something like 7 million people have already fled the country out of a famine, population of over 40 million and more coming every day. Most of those people, single largest chunk over 2 million, have gone to Colombia. Most of the remainder are elsewhere in South America, and roughly a half a million have made the very long, very dangerous trip through the Colombian jungles and mountains.

Through the Darién Gap was a section of lowland jungle where Panama meets South America. Then, all the way up through all of Central America and all of Mexico in order to reach the United States. A couple of months ago, the Biden administration granted them a degree of protected status because these are not your normal migrants. When we think of migrants today on the southern border, we’re not thinking of Mexicans.

Mexicans are way too skilled and the situation at home, despite the crime economically, actually is pretty decent. We haven’t had positive migration out of Mexico to the United States in 15 years now. In fact, it’s been negative in most of those years with more people going home than the other way around or American Snowbird in, for example. Venezuelans are different.

Most of the Mexicans who migrated in the eighties, in the nineties, in the 2000, the 20 tens didn’t come from northern Mexico, which is the wealthy part of the country, or central Mexico, which is the political zone. But the southern areas that have kind of been left behind. They’re of a different ethnic stock. A lot more indigenous blood education levels are lower.

And that’s why Mexicans in the United States have a reputation for doing manual labor. The Mexicans who have doctorates for the most part, stay home or work in northern Mexico, and there are a lot of them anyway. The flows more recently have been Central American countries, most notably Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. All countries that are flirting with failed state status.

And so their infrastructure is poor, education is poor, economic outcomes are thin. Agriculture is limited to tropical, which is very low value added, does not require skilled labor force. And so these are people who are desperate to look for anything else. And so, ironically, America’s capacity to interdict migrants is seen as a plus because it means their state capacity here in the United States, which they don’t have at home.

And as long as their countries are failing, they’re going to continue to look for ways to come here. Venezuelans are from category. Any Venezuelan who is over age 45 is one who was educated in the pre Chavez days, and that means he or she benefited from one of the most sophisticated educational experiences in the entirety of the developing world before Chavez drove the entire place into the ground.

So these are people with tradeable skills, master’s and doctorate degrees, and they are walking 3000 miles for a chance to avoid famine. So I’ve often said that the only way to keep the Central Americans out is to basically shoot anyone with a tan who tries to cross at the border. That wouldn’t work for Venezuelans because where they’re coming from has fallen so far.

Its standard of living, arguably, is now below that of the central American states and is going to get worse. We are looking at outright state collapse in Venezuela and everyone who has something that’s portable, mostly a skill set, is on their way to somewhere else. So a few things to keep in mind. Number one, we are facing the labor shortage in the United States that will not let up for a minimum of 20 years at some point, the American political system is going to have to deal with that.

And our options are fewer goods, fewer services, especially for retirees and much, much higher inflation or a degree of immigration reform. Now, I don’t think we’re going to get that in the near term. It will coming up on a political election year. Both the Trump team and the Biden team are furiously anti-migrant because they’re trying to court the unions into their political coalitions.

And the unions are arguably one of the two top most anti migrant and immigration groups in American politics today. So we’re not going to get it anytime soon. And of course, in the short term, Congress is not functioning because we don’t have a speaker for the House. So there’s that to a. But these are the sort of people, honestly, that the United States has always said that it wants skilled labor, not unskilled labor.

Second, no matter what happens on the border, no matter what our policies are going to be, these people are going to keep coming because their state is literally dying behind them. And what limited capacity we have to fly them home just starts the journey again because the alternative is to starve. So that’s not great. Perhaps third, most importantly is that the nature of Mexico has really evolved in the last five years.

The Mexican birthrate started to fall 35 years ago when NAFTA was operationalized, which means that the Mexican birthrate has been falling steadily that entire time and now is only just barely at replacement levels. That means Mexico has become a net destination for inward migrants. And so for the first time and all of these conversations about the border, we actually have the Americans and the Mexicans more or less coming to the table with a similar point of view.

And that is going to provide some interesting opportunities, especially since we can’t get any sort of legislative change when it comes to managing the flows. I don’t mean to suggest for a second that the situation on the southern border is about to solve itself. Hardly, but it is about to change pretty significantly in ways that are going to have a hard time wrapping our minds around.

We’re seeing more and more skilled migration coming up from the South and that’s not what we have set in our mind. So changes to come. We’ll see where it leads.