U.S. Politics Archives - Page 6 of 19

Trump Takes on Illegal Immigration

Trump’s immigration policies have caused quite the stir, specifically his hardline stance on illegal migration. So, how will these policies impact the US economy?

The US is in the midst of needing to double its industrial capacity, which will require a large labor force. Losing the population of 10-15 million undocumented immigrants would dig that hole even deeper. Trump isn’t approaching this from an economic or security perspective, his migration policies are being shaped by ideology.

By making the conditions for migrants worse and cutting off certain paths to legally enter the US, it will inadvertently encourage illegal border crossings and create enforcement inefficiencies. Practices like mass deportations are pulling resources from other important tasks and making future cooperation between the law and migrants less likely.

The better approach would be providing legal pathways for migrants to integrate into the economy, but Trump’s path is creating a permanent underclass.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a chilly Colorado. Today we’re near the most recent in Trump taking on the world. We’re talking about, Trump policies on illegal migration and where they are going to lead. First a little backdrop and, scene setting. A couple things. Keeping in mind, number one, the United States has somewhere between 10 and 15 million under documented people in the United States.

So that’s a substantial number of folks. And the United States is in the process of doubling the size of its industrial plant. As we prepare for the end of China as a meaningful participant in the trade system, that means a lot of blue collar jobs, and Ford loaded with construction jobs. So, anything that inhibits the labor force is definitely going to inhibit our ability to prepare for a post Chinese world.

So put that in the back of your mind as we go through the rest of this. There has always been a mixed view of immigration in general on illegal migration, in particular in the United States. As a rule, we go through ebbs and flows. We’re definitely at an ebb right now. And as a rule, the business community has been in favor of larger flows of migration in any form.

In order to access workforce, that has not changed. What has changed is that with the reshuffling of the American political deck, the business community is no longer in the Republican Party. Other swing voters now. And so they don’t have a say in immigration policy in the way they might have before. So as the United States goes through this transition, as we have a nativist moment and as, the Make America Great Again, movement has basically decided to take a very, very hard line on things like the border and migration.

Those are the folks that are making policy decisions at the national government. There will be an economic cost for that. The question is whether or not what Michael wants can be achieved. And in doing so, how does that reshape the world? And especially, of course, the United States, another little piece of backdrop, any policy that ignores why people are doing what they are and ascribe somebody else’s motives to them, generally doesn’t work.

This is one of the reasons why Maoist China was such a disaster. Same with Brezhnev’s, Soviet Union and Chavez’s Venezuela. People used ideology, their own ideology, to ascribe motives to other people and made policy based on that. And that’s a lot of what we’re seeing in Washington right now with the migration question. The official story is that these are a lot of illegal people who are doing a lot of bad things and a lot of crime.

There’s nothing in government statistics or private sector statistics that supports that. As a rule, migrants are less than one third as likely to commit a crime as an American citizen, largely because they know that the consequences are deportation. For the most part, well over 90%. The people who are crossing the border are coming in, searching of the American dream, a safer place to raise their children, a place where they can work and earn more money.

And above all, a place where rule of law works better than where they’re from. But by ascribing false motives, the enforcement system is really causing some problems in the short and ultimately the long term. So let’s start with the border, as was introduced under the Bush administration and really built up by size by the time we get to the Obama years, the tendency of illegals crossing north shifted.

It used to be that you tried to avoid the Border Patrol, but then people discovered things like asylum laws where you could apply for asylum and get into the court system. And after a certain amount of time, get a court case that could rule, a lot of criticism of system where people just to the system. But, you know, you’ve got, people waiting two and three years for court date.

And it turns out that the vast majority of people do show up, because they do get a relatively favorable reading. What has happened most recently is that the Trump administration has basically shut that down. They’re not even accepting applications. So if you show up to the border, you turn yourself over the border Patrol, they simply turn you around and walk you right back.

What that has done is encourage people to go back to the old system that we had before the 2000s, and basically just trying to sneak around the Border Patrol. And in doing that, Donald Trump in his first term made it very, very, very easy to cross the border undetected. You remember the border wall? Well, the border wall cuts through the middle of the Sonoran and the Chihuahuan Desert, which are the greatest natural barriers in the Western Hemisphere.

Fantastic for stopping illegal migrants from flowing. A lot of them just die on the trip. But if you build a border wall, that means you need to build 50 odd construction roads across half of that natural barrier. So all you have to do if you’re an illegal is use a ladder once to quadruple your income, and then you’re on a road.

And whether you’re working with a coyote or on your own with a dirt bike, all of a sudden it’s gotten much, much easier to cross. So I have no doubt that 20, 30 years from now, when we looked at back of this period, Donald Trump will go down in history as the greatest supporter of illegal migration in American history.

And that’s before some of these other changes. Ultimately, because most of the people crossing the border north want a better life, they are looking for avenues to cooperate with local government because living in the shadows isn’t great. If you’re an illegal in the United States and you have no chance of getting documentation, you probably only work for cash, which means you’re never going to buy a house.

You’re only going to rent. And if you pay for everything with cash, robbers tend to identify that and target you. And if you can’t go to law enforcement after you get robbed because you don’t have documentation, you may get deported, you then don’t cooperate with law enforcement, which makes it a lot easier for gangs and cartels to recruit on both sides of the border.

Or you can provide the illegals with a way to become legal. What’s going on now is that the Trump administration is taking the sharply opposite tact. And that’s going to hurt us in two ways. Number one, he really, really, really wants to have some showy, mass deportations. So he’s redirected other law enforcement to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, taking people off of other law enforcement duties to send them against illegal migrants.

He’s been hit very hard by this. But really, there’s none of the three letter agencies that haven’t seen a direction. And that means we’re not looking at things like money laundering or child porn. And there was a really a scary moment when people were starting to be pulled off of active monitoring of terrorist groups internationally, to be put in Chicago to round up illegals.

Luckily, the Trump administration backed down from that. But we’re seeing basically a hollowing out of the law enforcement capacity at a federal level to focus on this one thing. That’s a problem. Number two, Trump wasn’t happy with the numbers. So instead of going after the criminals, which means you go after people one at a time and you have to investigate to make sure they’re a criminal and you have to do a sting operation to get them.

They started going after groups of illegals who had shown no propensity for engaging in illegal behavior. So you started just to go to where those people were. So to use the stereotypical ones that had been proven true in the last couple of weeks, they’ve been going to churches on Sunday morning when people are with their families and basically arresting Hispanics in mass.

They’ve been going to food banks for people who are having problems. They’ve been going to Home Depot where there’s day workers, any place where you’re going to get a concentration of people with a tan have basically been, been targeted by law enforcement in order to generate the numbers that are necessary to meet Trump’s quotas, which he’s handed out to everybody.

And then once those people are grabbed, Trump tries to make it a very, very showy deportation, mostly using military jets. Well, here’s the fun thing about military jets, the globe masters that they’re using because they’ve got the reach. They’re designed to move like helicopters and tanks and equipment, but not really designed to move people. So you have to put seats in them and they can’t operate nearly as efficiently as, say, as a commercial airliner.

So it costs about $6,000 a person just to fly them to the country. You’re going to dump them off. And so it’s turned out to be this incredibly expensive operation that has netted very few criminals, but has also introduced a lot of fear into the community because the most recent one, just in the last week, is law enforcement is now going to the asylum hearings for the people who have kept their nose clean and cooperated with the system from the very beginning, and arresting them before they can even go in to get their hearing.

Or then, of course, if they get their hearing and denied immediately hauling them off in chains. And this is dissuading anyone who is an illegal migrant from ever cooperating with the system. Now go back to what we need to do as a country, double the size of the industrial plant. That’s going to be concentrated in certain areas, which means these illegal migrants are going to be clustered in places where the job opportunities are.

And now if they can’t cooperate with the federal government, they’re going to live as a permanent underclass, which is going to build up crime possibilities on all sides in all of those cities, and in no particular order, those cities are Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Birmingham, Montgomery, mobile, Atlanta, Richmond, Norfolk, Charlotte, and all of the other major cities of the North Carolina cluster. These are the places where the industrial activity and construction has been concentrated. This is going to be where the Hispanic migrant community is most likely to relocate. And now these are the cities that are most likely to have a starkly increased crime wave, because there is no point in migrants now cooperating with the system.

We’re going back to the system we had before the 2000s where migrants really were an underclass. I mean, the smart play here is to provide avenues towards legal migration, even if that doesn’t lead towards citizenship, so that the people can be part of the system so they can have a bank account so they don’t get robbed, so they can participate with law enforcement, and to shut the cartels out of our communities.

But what do I know?

Trump Takes on Trade

Photo of man standing in front of trade shipping containers

There’s plenty of tools at the disposal of the US President and tariffs are one of them. When used appropriately – i.e., to get something else or discourage a certain action – tariffs can be a very effective measure. However, Trump is using them as an end, rather than a means to an end.

This has blossomed into “reciprocal tariffs”. These aim to match foreign tariffs on US goods. At first glance, this idea seems fair, but the complexity of international trade, vast product categories, and admin that would be involved make this nearly impossible.

If Trump continues down this path, it is likely that US international trade would come screeching to a stop and a severe recession would follow.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. We are continuing with our, coverage of Trump’s first month in office. We’ve gone through the Middle East and China, the former Soviet Union, Europe. Today we’re going to talk about, international trade, specifically tariffs. Now, tariffs obviously are something that Trump is quite fond of. And it’s pretty clear by this point that he doesn’t necessarily see tariffs as a means to an end, but just an end in of of themselves, which is not great economic policy unless you already have your industrial plants set up.

And even then it’s wildly inefficient. But let’s focus on more of the specifics. I’ve talked at least briefly about the tariffs on America’s closest trading partners. I think it’s worth underlining what a couple of these things would do. One of the new ones is Trump says he wants to do a 100% automotive tariff on Canada.

Keep in mind that every car manufactured in the United States includes a substantial percentage of parts that come from Canada and Mexico, most of them over one third, a lot of them two thirds. And vice versa. It’s a very integrated system. So if you were to put anything more than about a 15 to 20% tariff on autos specifically, are you going to be taxing things as they go back and forth across the border?

And you’re going to cause a massive headache for American consumers, raising the price of your average vehicle by somewhere between 4 and $8000. If you do 100% tariff, we just stop making cars. Detroit collapses within a week, and Texas within a month. So, you know, not my recommendation. But I think a more interesting topic is one that’s gotten a little coverage.

The Trump implemented last week and something called reciprocal tariffs. And it sound on a surface to be pretty fair. The idea is if somebody else has a 15% tariff versus a product, that comes from the United States, then you should flip that and have a 15% tariff on anything that you take from them that is in that product category, and at least on the surface, against places like China where tariffs are high and subsidization is high, in order to force American products out of the product mix.

It seems like a great idea, right? A couple problems here. Number one doesn’t always line up that way for climactic reasons. So, for example, if Kenya has a tariff on imported coffee, we’re going to what tariff coffee we bring in from Kenya because, you know, we don’t export coffee, so we’d just be charging our people more.

That’s a pretty minor one. The bigger one, though, is administration. There are literally hundreds of thousands of product categories. And that’s before you consider intermediate product trade. And so if you want to do a reciprocal tariff, number one, you need a massive staff, at least an order of magnitude more than what we have a Customs Enforcement in the FTC, Federal Trade Commission right now just to learn all the product categories and all the tariffs for all 200 odd countries in the world.

And then you would need at least five times as many of that staff to then enforce, these tariffs at the border. Keep in mind that most international trade, even today, is not digitized fully. It might be on the container level, but each container is going to contain somewhere between dozens and thousands of products, and typically not all from the same country, because as container ships go around the world, they drop things off, they pick things up.

If there’s space in a container, you can always shove more in there. And by the time it gets to the United States, it’s a mess. And then what comes off is not all of it necessarily. Some of it gets shipped back out. And so somebody has to manually enter every single product. So it’s not so much that, reciprocal tariffs isn’t fair or is at least intellectually a good idea, but actually putting it into process basically ends trade, because it’s impossible to administrate with anything approaching the number of people we have in government right now in total.

Much less if you wanted to do anything else. Now, the fact that Trump has announced this anyway gets back to the general theme of all of this is that he’s built a completely incompetent administration that won’t tell him the truth, because the truth might not make him look great. But on this specific topic, it’s less of a designed incompetence and more a purposeful incompetence by his other staff.

Trump’s trade representative is a guy by the name of Jamison Greer, who is a smart dude who basically was raised from a pup by Robert Lighthizer. And Lighthizer was Trump’s first term trade representative. And Lighthizer has been in and out of government and at the center of American trade law going back to the 1980s into the Reagan administration.

So, I mean, this is a guy who knows everything, is everything about trade. He’s not shy about using tariffs, but it’s always when there’s a specific goal in mind in order to reshape the relationship. He just doesn’t just do tariffs or turfs anyway. Greer learned at Lighthizer he was his chief of staff, during Trump’s first term.

Definitely knows what’s going on. And definitely knows that reciprocal tariffs is a horrible idea unless you’re going to do an absolutely massive state expansion, which is definitely not in the cards. So one of two things either happened. Number one, he probably took the advice of Lighthizer because one of the things that Lighthizer learned from his four years working with Trump the first time around is you never contradict Trump.

Not in public, not in private. You just nod. You smile. You make him think that you were one of the brainless people that he has surrounded himself, that do nothing but tell him how wonderful he is, and then hopefully he gives you enough room and enough lack of attention, for you to actually go and do your real work.

And for Lighthizer, at least in part, that worked. He was able to renegotiate NAFTA and the Korean trade deal. He got a new trade deal with Japan, made a lot of progress on a trade deal with the United Kingdom. But then, we just ran out of time. And then there were the events of January 6th. So, Greer clearly knows that reciprocal tariffs are horrible.

Just beyond stupid idea. But either one. He kept his mouth shut, nodded, and smiled. Or number two. He told Trump this and, managed to do it in a way that didn’t get himself fired already. Even odds for probably the first one being the way one or whatever went.

So we’re going to see more things like this.

Because the only way that reciprocal tariffs can work is with a staff you can’t build. So either we go 1 or 2 directions at this time. Number one, reciprocal tariffs are actually implemented, in which case pretty much all international trade stops in the United States falls into a really, really ugly recession in a short period of time or, or there’s an actually an effort to implement it on a case by case basis for specific countries, absolutely wrecking trade relations with that country.

That could get interesting based on who you choose to go after. Hopefully it would not be a country like Canada. Oh my god. But if you did against India, that could actually set the stage for changing the relationship in any number of ways. But Trump coming to that conclusion would require someone to explain to him how reciprocal tariffs overall are.

Really bad idea. And I don’t think that is going to happen at all.

Trump Takes on China…or Not

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit

China is on its last legs. Its demographic picture is far past terminal. Its financial system makes Enron look responsible. Simply feeding its people is far beyond Beijing’s capacity without legions of outside assistance. And with the wider world ever-more-firmly turning against Chinese manufactured goods, there is little reason to expect an industrial recovery. If you don’t care for China, now is the time to nudge the country into history’s ash heap.

And so Donald Trump is picking trade fights with Mexico and Canada, the two countries indispensable to the United States if the goal is to create a world independent of the Chinese. In doing so, Trump is granting China that most precious of all commodities: time.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. We’re doing the latest in a series on what Trump is up to in the world. And today we’re going to talk about the Chinese. Now the Chinese are having a shit time. The demographic situation keeps getting worse. We’re at the point where we’re probably only a few years away from the general collapse of their labor market, and we have seen their labor costs go up by a factor of roughly 15 since the year 2000, which is, one of the 3 or 4 fastest increases in human history.

Financially, they’ve expanded their credit pool by a factor of 3500 at least since the year 2000. For point of comparison, the U.S has tripled. So we have an Enron style bubble. And basically every economic subsector they have, it’s probably a lot more than that 35 times, because they change the way they look to statistics when it comes to local government debt.

And they just cut it out of the system altogether. Stopped reporting. That probably adds another, times five. So, you know, 40 times anyway, so massively overexposed, massively leveraged. In terms of manufacturing, that means their labor costs have gone up. And so they’re not nearly as competitive as they once were. The Mexicans are now more competitive in almost every major manufacturing sector in terms of agriculture.

They’re the world’s largest importer in absolute terms, and they’re the least efficient producer in terms of the input per calorie that they get out. And almost all of those inputs are imported as well. From a security point of view, yes, they’ve got a lot of ships, but they need to be able to control global sea lanes if they’re going to protect their commerce.

And that is the job of the US Navy. So if you ever have a fight with the US, there goes their entire economic and development model. It’s just a series of bad upon bad upon bad. And at the very top, their government has become completely ossified, as chairman G has basically put the finishing touches on his cult of personality.

So it’s very difficult to get anything done in terms of policy. Not to mention that he’s pretty much blind to what’s going on because he’s shot the messenger so many times. Nobody brings him anything. You put all that together. Now is a great time to push against the Chinese and just knock them over the edge so they can fall into

The dustbin of history. So, what is going on with U.S. policy towards China is almost the opposite of what Donald Trump said he wanted to do during the election campaign. He took a very hard anti-China line, and one of the many impacts that Donald Trump had in his first term is he changed the conversation in the United States about China from potentially being a partner to definitely being a perceived threat or a foe.

But since he became president a second time, we haven’t seen really much on China. There’s been a blanket 10%, tariff on everything. And that’s about it. Instead, Donald Trump has reserved most of the fights that he’s picked for our allies and especially our close neighbors in Mexico and Canada. From the Chinese point of view, this has been not just a reprieve, but it’s allowed them to continue doing what they’re doing and shoving products into the American market.

Because ultimately, in a world without China, the United States is going to have to build out a massive amount of industrial plant in order to produce the things that we used to get from East Asia. And there is no way that that can happen unless it’s hand in glove with the Canadians and the Mexicans in the NAFTA system.

And so by picking tariff fights with the closest neighbors, what Trump has done is strongly disincentivize anyone from relo hating their operations from China to the United States. And that was in full swing calendar year 2024 and 2023 saw the greatest declines in foreign direct investment into the Chinese system that we have seen in ages. In fact, last year, total new investment in China was only $4.5 billion.

We haven’t seen a number like that since the early 90s. Companies were running to get out and getting to the North American market. But at a stroke, Trump’s tariff policy has frozen that in place, which is setting us up for a combination of factors. That is really problematic because if we haven’t built out enough industrial plant to replace the Chinese system when it crashes, we’re just not going to have stuff.

Now, the road from here to there was always going to be difficult. We’re talking about an environment that is not particularly conducive to industrial expansion, and the issue is a capital and labor. It’s largely a baby boomer story. When you retire, you liquidate your savings, you move out of stocks and bonds into cash and T-bills and the money that used to fuel economic development and credit in the broader system shrivels up.

Well, two thirds of the boomers have already retired. Two thirds of that money has already shifted over. So I’d argue that the rough tripling of capital costs we’ve seen in the last 5 or 6 years is largely demographic driven. That has very little to do with the economic cycle or policies of the Fed or Trump or Biden.

It’s just demographics. And on top of having now basically a capital shortage, that we need to somehow use what’s left to metabolize and build up this industrial plant. Trump has pledged to increase the annual budget deficit of the federal government by over $1 trillion a year. Now, you might say, well, he’s going to get some savings out of the federal government with all these mass firings.

But keep in mind that the vast majority of federal spending is Medicare, Social Security, defense, and, Medicaid. Those four together are the 7,080% of the total. If Trump does what he says he wants to do and fires a full one quarter of the federal workforce, that actually only reduces the government budget by about 2%.

So it’s a lot of sound and fury without a lot of movement. And on the backside, he’s going to add $1 trillion to deficit spending. That’s going to make everything else a lot more expensive and a lot more difficult. There’s also the labor situation. The United States, if it needs to double its industrial plant, needs a lot of blue collar workers to fill those jobs, and a lot of construction workers to build the plant in the first place.

Well, most construction workers are undocumented in some way. And so a mass deportation program not only stalls our ability to build in the first place, it shrinks the labor market overall. And at a time when we’re already at record low unemployment levels, all of this is making the Re industrialization more difficult. And now the tariff policy is forcing companies to take a pause and what they were already doing and give the United States kind of a side eye, because we now have something that we’re not used to hearing here.

Regulatory instability. And the Chinese at the moment look more stable than we do from that measure. And this is obviously a problem unless you’re a Chinese, of course, because what Donald Trump is doing right now is granting the Chinese that most valuable of geopolitical commodities time.

Photo of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit from Wikimedia Commons

Trump Takes on the Middle East

Israeli successes across the Levant have transformed the broader Middle East, wrecking the countries and militant groups that have long scourged the region. The moment is ripe for a complete reordering of regional norms. To capitalize upon this rare moment, Donald Trump wants to invest blood and treasure in the region’s most worthless and historically fraught chunk of land in order to build…hotels?

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Alright. We’re now going to do the third in our opening series on what Trump is doing in his new administrative term. And today we’re talking about the Middle East. Now, the Middle East is ripe for change. We’ve had, wow. We’ve had a lot of shifts in just the last six months, but really in the last two years.

So quick review. After attacks a little over a year and a half ago, now you’re gonna have to go. Wow. Has been that long? By Hamas. That’s the political group. The terror group that rules the Gaza Strip, which is an extreme southern Israel after the launch of terror attack. And Israel killed over a thousand people and took a couple hundred people hostage.

Israel’s been on a tear. It started with a borderline incompetent, invasion and occupation of Gaza. No matter how much went back and forth and how much it smashed and how much it bombed, and how many people were arrested, it just couldn’t root out Hamas. Because everybody who lives in Hamas is basically living in an open air prison.

And the people were given an opportunity to leave. What little they had was destroyed. And it was very, very easy for Hamas to replace any of its war losses with new recruits, because we got 2.2 million people with absolutely no options anyway. Well, that was all going on. And I’m just like, this is looking really bad. Israel was doing other things, and then it launched a decapitation strike using exploding pagers and of course, a lot of airdrop bombs on a military group, a terror group called Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

And in doing so took out the entire leadership. But shortly after that, the Turks managed to maneuver things over in Syria so that the Syrian government collapsed. And all of a sudden, if you’re Israel, you’re looking around and things have gotten pretty good. Hamas is in a box. We haven’t been destroyed, but they haven’t been able to strengthen, and all of the regional allies are gone.

Hezbollah has been decapitated, and the only way that you would resurrect Hezbollah is with a lot of additional support and training and personnel, which, ironically, would come to or through Syria, which is now gone. And that left Iran, which was the ultimate sponsor for Hezbollah and Syria on the wrong side of Iraq and really unable to do anything meaningful.

And so they were reduced to using diplomatic attachés to shovel cash into the country, one envelope at a time. And it’s just not doing what they needed to do. Even if Iran is able to regenerate Hezbollah, it took them 30 years to do it the last time. It’s not going to turn on a dime here. So there’s a real opportunity, not just for Israel, but for everyone in the Middle East, to turn the page and move on to something new.

It helps that no one in the Middle East likes the Palestinians at all. And specifically Hamas. So there’s a possibility here with a little bit of leadership and a little bit of creativity of the United States, that we really could open a new book. Now, just don’t turn a page, open a new book on what the Middle East is.

So Donald Trump wants to build a hotel. Donald Trump’s idea is that all of the Palestinians of Gaza will be relocated to another country. Keep in mind, all the countries hate them. And the United States will take ownership of Gaza, which is a little chunk of land sandwiched between Israel and Egypt, making it the least strategically valuable chunk of territory in the entire region.

And it will develop it into a resort area. And oh my God, opportunities like this don’t happen. But once a century or so. And this is not how you cement the future of a new region. Let’s just let’s just go down the reasons why this is a horrible idea. Number one, moving 2.2 million people. Let’s leave aside the whole genocide human rights thing.

I’ll let other people tackle that topic. Let’s talk mechanics. The last couple of times that we saw people relocated against their will, governments were participating in the relocation. Specifically, you had the partition of India, where a newfound India and Pakistan were basically agreeing to swap Hindus and Muslims so that they weren’t living among one another, and they had a better chance at having a peaceful coexistence.

The one before that is called the Beninese decree. In the aftermath of World War Two, when newly Soviet satellites like Poland and Czechoslovakia uprooted Germans and shipped them off to, the new German boundaries, specifically East Germany. When that happened, you had states that had agency and capacity and, gravitas to make it happen. So the new East Germany did a massive building program in order to accept its own people, back its own ethnic ethnics.

And the Soviets helped with transport and food. Also, you’re talking about northern Europe, which even in the aftermath of World War Two, had some of the densest transport arteries on the planet, including roads and trains. You had the same thing in India. This is part of the old British colonial mandate or the Raj. And as a result, you had the parts of Pakistan and India that are viable, economically viable, climatically livable, were attached to one another.

And so you could basically just run people on the roads, on the rail, back and forth until you achieve what you wanted. Also, in both cases, they were moving. People had housing to move into in the case of Germany, we’d had a population drop in the war. In the case of India and Pakistan, people were moving in each other’s homes.

It was ugly. It took years. There were definitely lots of complications, but it kind of sort of worked. That’s not what we’re looking at here. Number one, the Palestinians don’t want to move. Number two, there’s no infrastructure at all linking them to anywhere else. You either cross through the unpopulated part of Israel, that is the Negev, in order to get the unpopulated part of Jordan before you eventually get into a place that has already 70%.

How a Palestinian. But the leadership of Jordan is Hashemite Arab, and they hit the Palestinians, and they basically oppress the people, so they have a chance of retaining their throne. You throw 2 million pissed off Palestinians in that mix and Jordan goes from being a quasi failed state and a satellite of Israel to a chaos cannon in no time flat.

And all of a sudden, you’ve taken the problem of the Gaza Strip and turned it into a formal state called Jordan. Alternatively, you could go through exodus in reverse and cross a scenario where there’s almost no roads and certainly no rail. Then you get to the, Suez Canal where there is a bridge, thank God, and you can get over to populated Egypt, literally Exodus and verse, where the Egyptians say to the Palestinians and find a place in a country that is failing because it is now unpopulated, the ability of the country to grow its food itself.

And that’s before you consider global climate change or global trade breakdowns, which means that very soon the Egyptians won’t even be able to sell cotton and citrus on international markets to buy wheat to feed their own people. So you’re basically pre-judging the Palestinians for starvation and then we get a new access the other direction with Palestinians instead of Jews.

Those are the only option. So the only places you could walk from Gaza, we’re talking 2.2 million people. You cannot relocate them any other way. And when you’re done assuming all of that works, somehow you now have a chunk of land that is nothing but rubble abutting unpopulated Egypt and lightly populated southern Israel that you’re going to turn into.

What of Las Vegas, of the Middle East? No. And for that, you’re going to burn American blood and treasure, which is going to take way more than what we used in Iraq in order to get something in a place that nobody wants to be anyway. I’ve heard dumber ideas. Not often.

Yeah, I’m done with this one. Tomorrow we’ll talk about China.

No, I’m not done. I forgot to give you the forecast. So if Trump proceeds in trying to get the Arab states of the Middle East who don’t have the capacity to come and get the Palestinians to uproot the Palestinians, who don’t have the infrastructure to move the Palestinians or house or feed or water the Palestinians, if he tries to get them to do it anyway, talk about pressure on the relationship.

We’re at this wild moment where both Russian and Iranian power and the bulk of the Middle East has been broken in a short period of time. At the same time, if Trump does what he says he wants to, he will provide a years long window of opportunity for both of those countries to reestablish their old position, and then some, because Trump will do what Trump does and he’ll put pressure on everyone.

He started with Jordan. He moved to Egypt. He’s now working on Saudi Arabia, by the way. There’s even less infrastructure connecting Saudi Arabia to the zone in question. And he’s going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And if he does that, all relations with all Arab countries are going to freeze. And it will be very, very easy for the Russians and the Iranians to reestablish their position, however, and wherever they want.

Now I’m done. Tomorrow’s China.

Trump Takes on Russia…or Maybe It’s the Other Way Around

US President Donald J Trump, both directly and via his senior staff, has outlined his administration’s policies for Europe, Ukraine and Russia. If the policies come to pass it will be the greatest expansion of Russian power since the conquering of Eastern Europe in the waning days of World War II, and a long-term hobbling of American military and intelligence capabilities on a global scale.

And that’s not even the worst part.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Before we get into today’s video and really this whole series, keep in mind that I’m talking about very, very dynamic situations where somebody says something and somebody else responds. Specifically on today’s video about Russia, Defense Secretary Hagel said one set of things. He walked them back a few hours later. Trump countermanded him.

He walked them back the other direction, Trump said. So it’s all in motion. So what I am presenting in the video is my best understanding of where we actually are, as opposed to all the Douglas blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, now you know that. Here we go.

Okay, guys, I need my notes for this one. So I’m going to try to look down as little as possible. So there’s not too much that has to be edited out, but there’s definitely going to be some.

It has been a remarkably good month for the Russians ever since Donald Trump has come in. He stressed America’s alliance system to an extreme, and over the last few days, we’ve seen a number of decisions made publicly that have basically bent to the Russian will on any number of issues.

It started probably in the first full week, Donald Trump’s term, when he turned Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency on the Central Intelligence Agency. And now the agency has been the primary function within the US government for decades of informing the American president of the threats coming from Moscow in general, and has actually been one of the bureaus, has been most active in countering those threats.

And one of the first things that Musk did is went after the senior staff at the agency.

Specifically, the folks that are involved in threat detection and briefing the upper ranks of the U.S government on possible options. Donald Trump has made sure that his inner circle doesn’t have anyone who is competent in it, because common people have opinions on topics, because they know things about topics, and Donald Trump doesn’t like to be countered.

So he has always had a hostile relationship with the agency whose job it is to inform the executive branch, the only other president that comes even close to Trump’s degree of dislike for the agency was, of course, Barack Obama. Now, of course, the agency isn’t the only agency within the US government that is involved encountering Russian threats.

The Defense Department’s right out there, and Trump’s, directives against Defense Department have actually been more disruptive than what they have done against, the CIA, specifically the Trump effort on DEA diversity, equity and inclusion, basically the woke agenda, if you want to call it that, is something that has been around in the Defense Department before the Biden administration was actually implemented by the first Trump term as a recruiting tool to get people who are not simply white males.

We don’t know what the future of the military is going to be, but we know it’s going to be a lot more technically involved than what we have now, and we need to throw as wide of a net as possible. Trump’s words. Anyway, by trying to comply with the blizzard of anti die orders that the Trump administration has handed down since taking over the job again on the 20th of January, the military has basically stopped recruiting at anything that might be perceived as favoring anyone who isn’t a white dude, and that includes black technical universities.

So we’ve seen the possibilities for the Pentagon to do intake for people with the skill sets that we need to maintain today’s forces, much less built. Tomorrow’s basically go to zero. And, for the Russians, who have always been technically behind the Defense Department, we’re thrilled with that particular outcome. And then, of course, tying this all together requires some people in some important note.

And Donald Trump has found a doozy in Tulsi Gabbard. Now, you have to believe Gabbard falls into one of two categories. Number one, you have to believe the Russians who have publicly been calling her one of their agents for the better part of the last decade, something that U.S. intelligence has corroborated to anyone, Wolf. Listen or two, you have to look at what Gabbard has said when she’s been in or near Russia or China or Iran or Syria, where she is consistently built up a long track record of taking Anti-america fricken positions.

And that’s before you consider that DNI job that she’s taking. Is basically management job to funnel all of the intelligence that’s coming in into a single source, collaborate with the agencies to manage their output, and then inform the president, although she’s never had a management job or an intelligence job.

So either she’s a traitor or anti-American or incompetent or some combination of the three. And needless to say, the Russians are over the moon at her confirmation.

And then there’s Ukraine. Trump made it very clear in the last week that whatever negotiations are involved between the United States and Russia that he will handle personally and that the Ukrainians are not involved in the Europeans are not involved. Considering that the last time that Putin and Trump engaged in negotiations, Trump left behind his security detail, his translation team, his intelligence team, his national security team, and he walked into a room where Putin had all of those things with him.

And the Russians basically pumped Donald Trump for information for three hours and used the information they got to reshape the world over the next several years, which is one of the things that led to the Ukraine war.

Negotiating, master. Yeah. Anyway, I don’t want to prejudge the outcome of negotiations that haven’t yet started. But the other couple of things that are going on in Europe right now don’t make me particular, really, confident, has to do with Pete Haggis, who was the defense secretary. He was recently in Munich for the Munich security Conference, when all the Europeans and the Americans get together and talk about defense issues.

And he said very clearly and publicly and officially, that NATO will never admit Ukraine as a member and U.S. forces will never be on the ground in Ukraine. This is a European, not a NATO responsibility. And in doing that, he basically hewed to every demand that the Russians have made since the beginning of the war as the starting point for the American position.

I have not seen this degree of negotiating incompetence out of the American leadership since Barack Obama gave us that horrible deal with Iran. What was it ten years ago? And from a fairly similar point of view, Obama just didn’t want to deal with it. And it looks like the Trump administration just doesn’t want to deal with this.

Which brings us to the third, and perhaps the worst one, hangs up in a speech, made it very clear that not only would U.S. forces never be involved, and they would never be involved, that the Europeans were gonna have to do this themselves outside of NATO. And if the Russians attacked the European forces on Ukrainian territory, that NATO and the U.S. would not get involved in the subsequent conflict, basically abrogating article five as far as Ukraine is concerned.

And to call this a sellout is to be generous, because the United States founded NATO with the intent of guarding Western civilization from Moscow, and to say that now that the Russian forces are on the march, literally across the plains of Europe, backed up by North Koreans, no less, that, American position on the whole thing is basically met.

That Haig’s a speech was given in Munich, which is the place where the last time the West caved to a dictator, setting the stage for a larger and much more violent war than needed to happen. It is not it’s not lost on me.

And and I can tell you precisely where this will lead. I’ve got a book here that kind of dives into this about how the United States is eventually going to lose interest in NATO, and we will have a war in the plains of Europe between the Russians and the Central Europeans. Now, I had hoped over the course of the last three years that I was wrong.

But here we are. A couple things have changed. First of all, the Russian military is not nearly as capable of large scale lightning strikes as I thought it was ten years ago when I wrote that book. It’s more of a long, grinding war of attrition that’s really ugly and takes more time. And because of that, it does.

By the Central Europeans, more time to do things and to prepare, not just to rearm, for a broader conflict, but to engage in sort of technical military work that normally they wouldn’t have had the time for. And what we now need to watch for very closely is the nuclear ization of the weapon systems in Central Europe, specifically, Sweden and Finland have the capacity to go nuclear in a very short period of time, measured in weeks, if not days.

And once that happens, Ukraine, Poland and probably Romania will follow suit because this is really the only way that they can stand out if NATO forces are being completely withheld. Keep it. Keep in mind that the best forces that the Europeans have are bound up within the NATO alliance. And by saying to the Europeans that those cannot be used in Ukraine or against Russia, despite the fact that that’s the reason the alliance exists, really limits what the Europeans can do.

So they have already given significantly more financial and military aid to the Ukrainians than the Americans have. And by now, removing the best stuff from the table. We’re really getting the Europeans no choice but to play the nuke card. And once a number of countries in Central Europe do this, the Germans will be forced to consider doing themselves.

And that triggers a series of strategic entanglements that I really don’t have the brainpower to focus on right now.

I have always found it quizzical that people believe that as combative and erratic as Donald Trump is, that somehow he’s the person who’s going to usher in world peace, it is difficult to come up with a more perfect set of circumstances than what the Trump administration has set up in the last few days to trigger anything other than a horrific continental war in Europe.

But here we are, and tomorrow we’ll talk about what the Trump administration has cooking up in the Middle East.

Trump Takes on Washington

Second-time freshman President Donald J Trump is taking the axe to the federal workforce. Or at least he is attempting to. Like presidents before him Trump is discovering that America’s separation of powers does not enable a president to bypass the will of Congress or the role of the courts. Instead, he is burning through large volumes of his political capital to achieve fairly paltry results.

Does this mean the old/new president is down and out? Hardly. It just means he will have a bigger impact on people who are not protected by American laws and the American Constitution. It’s in the wider world where there is little to stop him.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Hello, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to launch a series on how the Trump administration is remaking the world. Whether or not you love this or hate this may, of course, come down to how you voted. But things are afoot, and I can’t ignore them. First, first, the caveat. Donald Trump is, in a word, erratic.

So I’m doing my best here, but I am working with some information. We had four years of the firehose of chaos. That was the first Trump term, followed by his four years out of power, where he made no secrets about what he planned to do. And now we’ve got about a month of information in his second term that has been, frenetic.

I think we can all agree at this point that Donald Trump is not a long game kind of guy. What you see is what you get. So with that said, here we go. Mass firings of the federal workforce and mass disruption to the federal budget is, legally dubious at minimum.

There are legal protections built into the system established by Congress for federal workers, and there’s a process to go through to get rid of them.

And you really can’t get rid of them if you just don’t like them. It has to be something that’s more than a personal preference, or has to be some sort of cause for firing. Same goes for the budget that’s established by Congress.

The Constitution is very clear where the power of the purse is. And once Congress has established the budget and it’s been approved and then signed by the president, nonetheless, there’s some wiggle room that the executive can have and how the money is spent and distributed, but it can’t do a wholesale reshuffling.

Same goes for things like citizenship. Birthright citizenship is established by the Constitution itself. So Donald Trump’s, executive orders on all of these topics, are at best on legally questionable ground and sometimes constitutionally, questionable ground. And so we have seen any number of court cases come up already challenging the orders, most of which, at least temporarily, have been ruled against, Trump, which gives us kind of the worst of all worlds here, all the things that Trump doesn’t like aren’t functioning, but we’re still paying for them.

And for those of you that find this sounds familiar, you’re just thinking back to the first Trump term where we had four years of this. So whatever Trump did this four years when he was out of power, it did not involve, studying American legal code very much.

If your goal is to remake the federal government, especially Barry Ocracy. This is ultimately a prerogative of Congress. And so the president would need to go to the Congress re structure the laws that, created the institutions, and gave them power and, of course, budget in the first place, which means that Congress would have to cede authority over budget and, action and guidelines, to the presidency.

Now, not only is this flying directly in the face of a lot of recent court cases launched by red states against the Biden administration, but we take about a dozen acts of Congress to do this on the scale that Donald Trump indicates that he wants to, keep in mind that passing things like this through Congress don’t just require a simple majority.

You gotta get that whole 60% sure thing. And, Trump is attempting to bypass this, by using some interesting rules in the House and the Senate. But we just haven’t seen Trump go to Congress with this request yet. And until that happens, it’s in the hands of the courts. And since the courts have already started to prove that, they hold the power here, Trump is now starting to challenge the legitimacy of the courts.

And, again, case law. For over a century, congressional law for over a century. It’s very strongly against the president on this one. If you want to go back to a time when the president had more authority, you have to go back to the end of the gilded Age, which was the last time that, the population got really set up with oligarchic politics, back in the Gilded Age and before we had a race to the winner go the spoils, which basically meant that every time a new president and his new team came in, regardless of who his backers were, the president had the ability to completely remake the federal bureaucracy in whatever image he wanted. And so basically, the government started over every 4 to 8 years, and we collectively, as a country, decided that, the federal government exists to serve the people rather than the proclivities of a specific individual. And we professionalized things like the Foreign Service and the bureaucracy and all that good stuff. What Trump is seems to be trying to do is dial the clock back 130 years to what was arguably the least economically unequal time in American history in the aftermath of reconstruction.

You can do that if you want to, but that requires Congress.

Trying to go head to head with the bureaucracy without using Congress is kind of like, I don’t know, riding off against thieves without getting your posse together first. And it’s not probably going to work. Well, well, and he’s burning through a massive amount of political capital. Only one month into the job, incidentally, the last American president to take this general approach, for the same reason, trying to rein in the bureaucracy.

It was Jimmy Carter, and he failed at it. And that failure is one of the reasons that Jimmy Carter is not thought of as one of the great presidents of American history. Now, does this mean that Donald Trump has no power? No. Don’t be dumb. The US president is still the most powerful person in the country and in the world.

He has just chosen a field of combat in the specific instances where the deck is stacked against him. When you’re going up against American citizens in America, there are American laws on the American constitution that give them a leg up. But when you look at the wider world where there are not American citizens and American laws do not protect them, the American Constitution is not relevant.

Then all of a sudden, the power of the American president has is robust. And we’ll start looking at that specific situation, beginning with Russia.

Trump’s Political Capital Bonfire

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Trump has used up a lot of paper in his first 10 days in office, but he hasn’t spent much time working with Congress to make his executive orders stick.

Since President Trump doesn’t have the power to raise or reallocate funds, his executive orders are mostly symbolic. He’s also using his available resources on things that might not be the best place to put them, but without an inner circle that would warn him of these mistakes…it will continue to happen.

Many of these executive orders are questionable anyway; like an “Iron Dome” system that doesn’t make sense or freezing federal grants without clear guidelines. Oh, and these aren’t just impacting us domestically, a freeze on foreign aid has disrupted diplomatic and strategic influence abroad.

The main point of all this is that Trump is burning through his political capital at an alarming rate, and it risks the long-term effectiveness of his administration. But hey, no one said that this presidency wasn’t going to be chaotic.

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

Hi it’s Michael. I’m in for Peter, who unfortunately, is feeling a little under the weather and has lost the use of his voice. You all were about to watch a video of that Peter recorded earlier today about the executive orders that the Trump administration is issuing. The order in question that is the main focus of this video has in those two hours since been rescinded.

But we are going to continue to share this video because we think that the analysis and conclusions in it ultimately stirring. True. And, the the potential for chaos and confusion that Peter highlights obviously was shared by enough stakeholders, both inside and outside of the government, that the white House, has decided to reevaluate their approach. So if that feel better, Peter, and, we hope you enjoyed the video.

Hey, everybody. Peter zine here, coming to you from Colorado, where I am rapidly losing my voice. We’re about ten days into the new Trump administration, and, well, it’s been. Shall we? But it’s not clear to me that anything has really changed. Donald Trump has issued, dozens are we have to hundreds. Now, I’ve kind of lost track of short executive orders, claiming a lot of stuff, asserting a lot of stuff.

But not once. He’s actually asked for anything from Congress. And keep in mind that the US presidency cannot raise funds or really even transfer funds, from one agency to another so he can squeeze the blob a little bit. But without congressional action, not a lot can happen. But in doing so, Donald Trump has picked a lot of fights that didn’t need to be picked.

And he’s really gone after the core of what a lot of people to consider to their political identity, to be, without a lot of immediate payback. So let me give you an example of this. Donald Trump’s made a very big deal about going after illegal migrants, especially those with criminal records, which I don’t think, especially in the criminal records thing anyone has a real problem with.

But from talking with agents that are within, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there’s no one who money that comes with these directives. What has happened is other law enforcement branches of the federal government have been to redirect to assist, Ice in whatever they’re doing and going after these people. So you get folks from, like the Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms or the FBI or whatever.

Now collaborating, cooperating with Ice in their roundup operations. And that’s all well and good, but keep in mind that anyone who’s helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going after illegals is not doing what they were doing before. So they’re not investigating financial fraud. They’re not investigating smuggling. So the blob has been squeezed and we have more resources going to a specific task, and it has generated a few thousand requests, but it’s come at the cost of everything else just kind of flying by the wayside.

Now, any any middle school adviser to Donald Trump would have been able to warn him that this is exactly what was going to happen. But over the last four years, rather than build up a legislative block that he wants to push through in order to generate a real durable change in the American system, he has since instead purged himself of anyone who might not just tell him no, but yes, but, and as a result, he’s got this shell of dense incompetence around him now where no one will tell him anything other than exactly what he wants to hear.

And so we get these scads of just very, very brief, executive orders that really don’t move anything. Another example is recently Donald Trump signed another brief executive order, to establish an iron Dome system around the United States. Now, Iron Dome is the missile defense system that the Israelis used to protect themselves from mortars and rockets.

Keep in mind that, Israel’s about the size of new Jersey, and the weapon systems that are being launched at them are very, very, very short range ballistic, nothing like what the United States has to deal with in the mainland. So if we were to spend the approximately $40 trillion that it would take to build up a nation wide Iron Dome system, all it would do is protect Detroit from Hamilton, Canada, and San Diego from, Tijuana.

Everything else is too far away. It’s the wrong weapon system. But of course, there’s no money behind this because it’s an executive order, so it just looks really silly to anyone who knows anything about missile defense at the border.

And Trump’s picking a lot of fights with a lot of people that don’t need to be picked. We had a we had a two page executive order from Trump a few days ago that shut down the distribution of all grants, about $3 trillion of funds, most of which are distributed through the states or through private organization or nonprofit organizations.

And this is everything from the small small Business Administration to Meals on Wheels. And according to the directive, until such time as everyone can indicate that they’re complying with the new regulations and attitude, was the right word.

Orientation, I think, is the word, that Donald Trump is trying to establish. The money can’t be distributed. But it’s a temporary hold of three months. Well, there was no guidance in that. Two pages to basically regulate $3 trillion of distribution. And so it’s all been shut down, which means in the not too distant future, you’re looking at like, you know, dead old people because Meals on Wheels isn’t working. I mean, these are unpicked fights.

These are unforced errors. But Donald Trump is making a lot of them and burning a lot of capital to do it very, very quickly. There could also be damage on an international scale because he’s done basically the same thing with an executive order. Very short, very brief, very few details, shutting down any foreign aid that requires dollar transfers, which is, with the exception of some military assistance, almost all of it.

So we’ve seen the US global position diplomatically and strategically basically frozen. And we’ve seen the U.S. domestic position when it comes to the interface between the population and the government in anything except for entitlements basically frozen, with no clear guidelines as to what’s next or what the parameters might be. And Congress has yet to be involved at all.

These are not the sort of mistakes that a second term president should be making, but they are being made by the dozens. And it’s unclear on the other side of this how much Donald Trump’s political capital will remain, because he’s going through it at a pace that I have never seen by any leader in any country in modern history.

But I got to admit, there’s a show and it’s entertaining.

A New American Imperialism?

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

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

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

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

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is how empires ultimately fall apart.

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

Trump’s New Grand Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jimmy Carter and Jihad – MNNO’s Take

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

Cover photo from Wikimedia Commons

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

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