Trump’s Disqualification: How We Got Here

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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.

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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.

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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…

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

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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…

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

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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.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

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

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from 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.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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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.

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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.

Deglobalization: The US Navy’s Withdrawal as Global Protector

If you’ve read my latest book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, you know that a driving force behind deglobalization is the US Navy stepping away from its role as patroller of the world’s oceans. So why is this happening, and what will it change?

The key thing to note here is that the US never did this for themselves (sure, it came with some perks, but there was a greater purpose). At the end of World War II, the US knew something had to be done to stop the Soviets. So, the US created a global trade network to incentivize enough countries to “stand up” against them.

As the Cold War ended, the US ran a cost-benefit analysis, and something wasn’t checking out. The globalized system that once worked in favor of the US alliance network has started to shift in favor of countries outside of that group.

The US Navy still has a global presence, but it is nowhere near the scale it once was. As this presence continues to taper off, what will the repercussions be? The ultimate result will be the collapse of globalization, but the path there is undecided.

If there were a perfectly ironic ending to the globalized world, it would have to be the Russians causing the total collapse of supply chains and bringing this globalization endeavor full circle.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Support medshare's ukraine fund
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Transport: The Economics (and Politics) of Railroads

Today’s video comes to you from Needle’s Eye Tunnel on the Rollins Pass Railroad.

My walk along the railroad tracks inspired some pondering on why rail gets such a bad rap. Yeah, I know it’s not as fast as planes OR as versatile as vehicles OR as cheap as water…but that doesn’t mean there’s no place for it.

The rail conversation comes down to is where and how it is used – i.e., don’t send trains up and over huge mountain passes like the one I’m on. However, most rail lines aren’t really built for “economic” reasons; instead, they are used to project political power over large swaths of land. The US did this with the transcontinental railroad, and the CCP is still doing it today.

While rail might be the redheaded stepchild of the transport industry, it is still very much an integral part of the family.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

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

What Makes Vietnam a Valuable US Ally?

Biden recently announced that he’d be making a trip to Vietnam, which will likely occur in September when he visits other regional powers. But what makes Vietnam such a valuable asset to have in the US portfolio of allies?

Is it because they’re a major regional power? Or because they have a better demographic profile than others in the region? Sure, that factors into it, but it really comes down to positioning and attitude.

Due to geographic challenges, the integration process (and political unification) following the Vietnam War has been an ongoing endeavor. While there’s no brushing past the ‘history’ that Vietnam and the US share, that pales in comparison to their history with the Chinese. If there’s one thing all the Vietnamese can agree on…it’s that they hate China.

But let’s not forget that the Vietnamese bring more to the table than just a desire to crush the Chinese. They would be a solid trade partner with strong demographics, a sound education system, and excellent relations with other regional allies. Sounds like a damn good deal for the US. The only sticking point is the Chinese-style political system that still exists in Vietnam…

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

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

Why Can’t We Trust the Media?

Before I answer the question about what news sources I use, we must understand how the hell our society became so damn uninformed…

Propaganda only works when you have an uninformed society, and if you haven’t looked up in a while, we can’t even agree on what color the sky is anymore. So yeah, propaganda is doing just fine here in the States. But how did we get here?

It all started with the fax machine, which began eliminating the staff that once served as ‘fact-checkers’ for stories before publication. Then email came along and only exacerbated this issue, doing away with any auxiliary staff. It isn’t so much that biases went unchecked (although that happened in spades), but instead that there were fewer eyes and brains to ensure the story was actually correct. The opportunity for the less scrupulous among us to make their version of the world known crept in. (The technical term is “lying”.) And…a lot of people like that. Cue the entrance of charismatic individuals who woo people with deliberate deception.

So if you believe the sky is neon green (or if you’re tired of hearing that it is), maybe check out one of the following news sources: Al Jazeera, France 24, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Straight Arrow News, or local stations. I’m not saying these are perfect, but they’ll get you going on a better path.

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

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY

Ask Peter: Is Biden Killing US Energy Independence?

We appreciate the interest and engagement from our followers, but with Peter’s travel schedule and sheer volume of requests, we are unable to answer non-business-related questions via e-mail. If you’d like to join in on the conversation, head over to the community tab on our YouTube Channel

Our next video in the ‘Ask Peter’ series comes to you from just above Loveland Pass at about 13,000 ft. As the Biden administration piles on more drilling restrictions on public land, will America’s energy independence be jeopardized?

Quick backstory on America’s energy journey. The US was a net energy exporter until 1973. Once we used up all the “easy-access” oil, we became the world’s largest oil importer, peaking in the mid-2000s. Then the Shale Revolution changed everything.

Fracking gave the US access to a boatload of new oil (this technology has been around for a while but wasn’t popularized until the early 2000s). Fast forward to today, and the US is once again energy independent (minus a little COVID hiccup).

So will the Biden administration’s new restrictions on public land drilling set us back again? Oil from public lands accounts for such a marginal amount of the total US output that any of these regulations aren’t going to move the needle much. As long as there’s an incentive for these private landowners to be successful, this shouldn’t be a problem…

Offshore drilling is a little different. The quick and dirty is that short-term market moves aren’t the primary motivator in this space, so longer approval periods and stricter regulations aren’t of too much concern.

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

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S UKRAINE FUND

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDSHARE’S EFFORTS GLOBALLY