United States Archives - Zeihan on Geopolitics

Half A Million Immigrants Get the Boot + Auto Tariffs and the Art of Routine Vehicle Maintenance

Half A Million Immigrants Get the Boot

The Trump administration has decided to rescind legal status for over half a million immigrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti. If you’ve listened to any of my videos, you’ll know there are some glaring holes in this decision.

First, the labor impact. The US is already facing a labor crunch, and the problem will only be exacerbated as we shift away from manufacturing in China. These immigrants had already been vetted and were ready to contribute to the workforce…there goes that.

There are legal and social consequences as well. Since these immigrants were fully integrated in the US system, stripping them of their legal status forces them into the cash economy and makes them targets for crime and exploitation. This also signals to future migrants that following legal pathways is futile, leading to more illegal crossings.

It’s just another notch in the undermining of trust by the Trump administration.

Auto Tariffs and the Art of Routine Vehicle Maintenance

The Trump administration announced a 25% tariff on imported cars and car parts. While this tariff isn’t as severe as the others expected on April 2, it will still increase the cost of vehicles in the US by $2-3k on average.

There are some NAFTA exemptions for this tariff, but any vehicle containing 50% imported parts will still face a 12.5% tariff. This will impact all the manufacturers across the industry a bit differently, with the European manufacturers feeling the most heat.

Prices start to get spooky when you begin stacking tariffs. Between the 25% tariff on steel and aluminum and the reciprocal tariffs coming soon, I would keep driving your vehicle for as long as you can.

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, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a hotel room. I don’t have a lot of time today, so packing up while I do this. Okay, so, the issue is, I see today is the 25th of March, and yesterday, the Trump administration rescinded legal, status for about 530,000 immigrants, specifically from Venezuela and Nicaragua, some from Haiti.

Two big problems here. The first is that we are in a labor crunch. We have record low unemployment in poorly and a half a million people who are participating in the labor force. The kind of problem, you see, these were not your normal people who cross the border. These are people who got legal ization from the Biden administration not just to come here, but for them to come here.

They had to register with authorities, have an interview with Department of Immigration, have a financial sponsor. And so they were integrated to the system. They had passed checks. So we’ve basically done all the work necessary to make them citizens. And then at the last segment, like say so, unless they’ve already proceeded on to the next step, they now have to go home.

That’s problem one. Remember, we need to double the size of the industrial plant if we’re going to be ready for the Chinese collapse. That means a lot of construction. That means a lot of people building things. And as a rule, construction is a sector where most American citizens don’t want to work. So this is a real problem for the labor force.

So to invest all of this time and effort and money and man hours in making these people ready and then kicking them at the last second, that’s just a waste. Second problem is legalities. And not the legalities of doing this. President obviously has the authority. The problem is on the other side, you see, when you’re legal, when you’re in the system, you can get a bank account, you can own property, you can register for health care.

You can send your kids to school without having to worry about pulling them out the next day. And when you’re in that sort of environment, law enforcement is a resource you can draw upon. So, for example, if you’re a legal, illegal, you’re in the cash economy. And that means that everyone in your area who knows you’re not a legal migrant knows that you basically deal with cash.

And as a result, you’ve identified yourself as someone to rob. And if you are Rob, you don’t go to law enforcement because you’re afraid you might get deported. So for these 530,000 people, we weren’t in that category. They were, for as far as we can tell, law abiding immigrants.

And that means that now the Trump administration has basically penalized a half a million people for following the law, which means that the next half a million that come will probably not make the same mistake.

This is an issue that we have had pretty chronically, since the 1980s, when the Reagan administration was the last administration to go through and change the legal structures for migration. We haven’t really given would be migrants an incentive to participate with the system? And this sort of thing is definitely going to accentuate that problem.

Keep in mind that within the last month, the Trump administration has, started arresting, would be migrants that have also participated with the system through the, the, CBCp, arresting them on their way to their court hearings where they were supposed to be ruled upon, whether or not they were legal or not, and just grabbing them and send them home.

So the next wave is definitely going to cross illegally and form an underclass in American society. And as we’ve seen with the phase one of the Trump administration. And, you know, four years ago, the wall did wonders for encouraging illegal migration, made it a lot easier because the Sonoran and the Chihuahuan Desert are the greatest natural barriers in the hemisphere.

And by building 50 construction roads across the desert to build the wall, we basically obviated half of the barrier. This is definitely going to take advantage of that when we get our next big wave, which will probably happen as soon as the migrants can figure out how to navigate the new system, which, historically speaking, takes about a year or two, so we won’t have to wait too long.

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. It is the 27th of March and late yesterday. Donald Trump initiated yet another tariff. I think this is the 87th tariff policy that we’ve had in the last six weeks. Oh my God. Seven weeks. Seven weeks. Anyway, 25% tariff on all imported cars and car parts. This is not the one that I was dreading.

This one is actually not too bad, considering the scope of all of the others. Because if the car or the car part is produced within Canada, Mexico, in the United States, and is registered as a NAFTA product to import lifts, then it gets a bypass. So if your car is made out of one half content that comes from somewhere else.

You now have a 12.5% tariff on the vehicle. It’s still going to drive up the cost of vehicles in the United States on average by about 2000, maybe $3,000 in some cases. But, because most of these imported parts don’t go back and forth across borders, in the NAFTA system. It’s not nearly as bad as what a NAFTA tariff would have been, which is what Donald Trump is threatening for April 2nd anyway.

This will kick in on April 2nd as well. Not all vehicles are made equal. And just because it’s in a U.S. company does not necessarily mean that they don’t use a lot of import content. Automotive is unique among the world’s manufacturing sectors in that everyone produces some of everything because almost everybody needs cars at some level.

So the Germans make the good transmissions, the Mexicans make the mediocre transmissions, and the, Chinese make the crap transmissions. Just to pick one. So just because it’s a Ford or a Chevy doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot of imported content. As a rule, the Big Three American automakers do have more. The the changes model by model.

And as a rule, the Japanese, most notably Toyota, also have a lot of North American content because they have this concept of build where you sell and they put their money where their mouth is, and they’re trying to get on the right side of tariff and political issues. Once you get into Korean cars, it drops quite a bit.

And once you get into the European cars, it really drops. Most of the European and manufacturing centers that are in North America actually use almost 100%, in some cases, 100%, imported content from Europe. And then, of course, if you’re getting a Beamer that comes from Bavaria, it’s probably 100%, European content as well. Anyway, we’re putting up this handy little chart so you can see of the top 25 models, which ones or which.

Generally, the closer you are down into the red towards zero, the more your vehicle is going to cost. And a quick reminder that this is just one of the tariffs that is hitting automotive. We’ve got another one that’s in place already. And that’s the 25% tax on imported aluminum and steel, which you know every vehicle has a lot of both of those.

And then once we get to April 2nd, that’s when Donald Trump is going to be announcing a lot more tariffs, something he calls reciprocal tariffs, probably NAFTA tariffs and then additional tariffs on everybody on the outside that he doesn’t like. He calls them the dirty 15. And they’re really just our 15 largest trading partners. So you put those three together.

Remember these all stack up with one another. They’re cumulative and could easily see the cost of automobiles in the United States going up by $10,000 a vehicle, or maybe even a lot more based on where they come from.

Now the data in this graphic is from 2021. There is more recent data available from the Department of Transportation. Unfortunately, because of the bonfire of staffing that is occurring in the federal government right now, it is not in an easily absorbable format. So it’s going to take us a couple days to process it. And we will get that out as soon as is feasible.

Which reminds me. We’ll be covering all of this and all of its, and to severe effects when we do our quarterly briefing, our question time when people can ask me questions in real time on April 9th.

It is for our Patreon subscribers at the top tier. So sign up now and learn about all these tariffs as they happen. And then we’ll pull it all together for you and show where it’s going to take the American and the global economy over the long run. See you soon.

The Future of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander + Live Q&A Reminder

We’re only one week out from the next Live Q&A!

Our next Live Q&A on Patreon is here! On April 9, Peter will join the Analyst members on Patreon for question time! In order to get in on the fun, join the ‘Analyst tier’ on Patreon before April 9.

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The Supreme Allied Commander position in NATO allows the US to lead allied forces in wartime. However, the Trump administration is considering withdrawing the US from that position (mainly for cost-cutting reasons).

Stepping away from the Supreme Allied Commander position would signal America’s withdrawal from NATO, since US forces cannot legally be placed under foreign command. There must be some strategic misunderstanding of the power this title holds, a lack of expertise in Trump’s circle, a penetration into Trump’s thinking by Russian propaganda, or a combination of all of those.

Should the US move forward with leaving NATO leadership, US power projection in Europe would be crippled and another box on the Russian wish list would be crossed off.

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 a sunny Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about something that is making the rounds within the Trump administration as it relates to the NATO alliance. The idea is that the United States is going to withdraw from something called the Supreme Allied Commander position. Now, the Supreme Allied commander, as it sounds in times of war, takes command of all local military forces that are affiliated with the Alliance. So in a hot shooting war, the US would take control of the world’s third, fourth, sixth and seventh largest navies and the world’s fourth, fifth, sixth, ninth and 10th largest armies, as well as that of all the smaller members of the European structures. And the question is, why would you give that up?

Well, keep in mind that NATO is the most powerful alliance in human history, and it was founded by the United States, and it was run by the United States. And, yes, the lion’s share of the equipment and the troops come from the United States. But since all of the Europeans have regional militaries, while their militaries may be stronger, they’re all focused on one area as opposed to ours, which is spread out around the world.

So collectively in the European theater, the rest of the European forces actually are on par with what the US can do. So a massive force multiplier there. The Trump administration says that the NATO countries, the European countries, have been taking advantage of the United States and trade. They need to defend themselves. But how? Giving this up would be a big deal. It would be the end of American ability to project power throughout all of Europe.

You see, unlike the other NATO countries who can sublimate their military commands to American authority, the reverse is actually illegal here in the United States. So if we give up the ability to command Europe and say, a European has to take that position, we’re also saying that no American forces are now available for NATO use, and that’s functionally leaving the alliance.

Now, I personally think that would be a horrible idea, but I think it’s going to happen anyway. The Trump administration seems fairly hellbent on leaving NATO. Three things going on here. Number one, the Trump administration seems has a very inaccurate idea of how militaries work. Because in a time of war, when you need the help to be able to automatically, reflexively just be able to take control of everyone else’s militaries in the alliance and just go through.

How much is that worth to you? How much is it worth to have that on standby the whole time? It’s worth the cost of a trade deficit, in my opinion. The second issue is that Trump doesn’t really have anyone in his circle telling him otherwise or correcting him on these things. One of the weird things about the Trump administration is, you know, normally when you lose an election, they’re out of power for a few years. You try to learn from your past mistakes. You try to build a team that is competent, that fills in the gaps with the things that you don’t know. And you get people who are experts in legislation so that when you come back, you can get everything pushed through Congress as quickly as possible.

Codify what you want and have it outlive you. Trump’s taken the opposite lesson, and he’s removed everyone from his circle who knows anything about anything, because people who know things tend to say that they know things. And that means that Trump is not always the person who appears as the smartest one in the room. It’s the difference between a good leader and a bad leader.

That means that Trump is making the decisions based on the advice that comes to him from a handful of people he trusts, and the people trusts aren’t honest with him, which is bring us to the third problem. Russian propaganda has penetrated up to and including the white House. Last week we had Donald Trump repeating some particularly interesting propaganda.

Notice he was saying, in true social posts and in interviews that the Russians had surrounded several thousand Ukrainian troops, and he was pleading with the Russians to not kill them in what would be a bloodbath. Here’s the thing that never happened.

In fact, that didn’t even occur in Russian propaganda in American political circles. That was Russian propaganda for Russian citizens to try to convince the Russian citizenry that the war in Ukraine was going very well.

Somehow that little bit got lodged in Trump’s mind. And it didn’t come from the CIA or the FBI or the Defense Department. It either came directly from Vladimir Putin or through one of the other vectors that the Russians have been using to influence this administration. So we have a white House that is making public statements and policies, basing on an internal Russian propaganda.

Now. And if I could think of one thing that the Russians want in the short term from this administration, it’s to destroy the NATO alliance, which was always formed to contain Russian aggression. And here we are.

The American Reindustrialization – A (Stalled) Progress Report

I recorded this video before Trump took office for his second term. At the time, this video outlined the trajectory the US was on. We held off on releasing the video because…well, everything was going to be changing. So, here is a look at where we could have been. In the coming days, we’ll unpack where things are heading now.

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, taking a question from the Ask Peter Forum on the Patreon page. And that is where is the United States or where do we stand in the re industrialization process that started a few years ago? Just a quick backgrounder. The Chinese population is plummeting. And we now have about the same number of people in China above age 50 as below.

And so we’re looking at an economic collapse over the course of sometime in the next decade. And so if the United States still wants manufacturing goods, we’re gonna have to get it from somewhere else. And the quickest, easiest, cheapest way to do that is to build out the industrial plant within North America. And to that end, we have seen industrial construction spending.

Think of that as the construction of factories, expand by a factor of ten over the last five years. So we are definitely hitting the ground running in a number of sectors. The two sectors that have seen the most activity are things that are energy adjacent. Taking advantage of the fact that the United States has the largest supply of high quality crude in the world and the largest supply of natural gas in the world, retooling our entire chemical sector to run off of, especially the natural gas.

And now using all of these intermediate products that we get from the processing of this for other things going into heavy manufacturing. So that’s a big part of the story that is moving very, very fast and is being moved almost exclusively by, domestic economic concerns without any push from any politicians anywhere in the system, because it’s just we have the most and the cheapest.

And so the next logical step is then to move up the value added scale. That’s proceeding just fine. Most of the stuff where the government has put its finger on the scale involves electron IX, and especially computing. Think of the Chips act and the IRA, which are designed to bring back the manufacture of things like semiconductors. Now, it’s not that I think that any of this is a bad idea.

I just think it’s kind of missing the primary need we’re going to have. There are 9000 manufacturing supply chain steps that go into the manufacture of a high end semiconductor. And the Fab facility, while important, is only one of the 9000. And there are any number of ways that the United States can build out the supply chains, in addition to the fabs that are a lot cheaper than the fab.

So I’m not saying no. I’m saying it’s really, really myopic, focusing on one very, very specific piece when you need all of them. If you’re looking for a recommendation, I would say the single biggest restriction on manufacturing in general is going to be processed materials. I know that doesn’t sound very sexy, but it really is a problem.

In the United States, we have steadily outsourced pretty much anything that is energy intensive and might have an environmental footprint that we don’t like. The Europeans have done the same to a lesser degree, the Japanese the same thing. And most of the stuff has gone to China. It’s not that China is better at it, a more efficient at it.

It’s just that the Chinese massively subsidize everything and their environmental regulations are significantly lower. So taking raw materials like bauxite and then turning them into an aluminum and then aluminum, the Chinese control roughly 60 to 70% of that market for something like gallium, which is a byproduct of aluminum processing, it’s closer to 90% for things like rare earths, it’s over 80%, for lithium.

It’s not that they have the lithium that comes from Australia and Chile, but they take the lithium concentrate in the lithium ore and they turn it into metal in China. And you can just go down product after product after product for the Chinese. Basically, if cornered, this market. Well, if the Chinese go the way that I’m anticipating all of that’s going away and we’re going to make our own, it’s luckily there’s nothing about these, material processing technologies that is difficult in most cases.

You’re talking about things that were developed over a century ago, and it would probably only take a couple of years and a few billion dollars to set up for each specific material that we need. So not hard, but something that is cheap and quick is not the same as saying that it is, free and overnight. Right.

And until we do the work, we haven’t done the work. And if China cracks before we do the work, then we have to figure out how to re industrialize without lithium or aluminum or cobalt or on and on and on and on and on. So this is something where I would expect state governments to take the lead, because it’s ultimately about an environmental regulation issue paired with the energy intensity that’s required.

And so most of this is probably going to end up going on in the Texas or Louisiana coastal regions, where those two things kind of come together right now nicely for the federal government to be part of the solution. But considering politics in the US, I think that’s a kind of a high bar. One other broad concern, no matter what the industry is, no matter what is reshoring, no matter what, we’re expanding automotive, aerospace, insulation.

You know, take your pick. All of it requires electricity. For the last 35 years, the United States has become a services only economy to a certain degree. We do manufacturing still, in terms of net value, we produce more in the manufacturing sector than we did 35 years ago. But everything else has gotten so much bigger. And while the AI push with data centers does require more electricity than what we’ve done before, as a rule, moving things, melting things, stamping things, building things requires more energy than sitting at a computer and typing.

And so we have, for the first time in 35 years, a need for a massive expansion in the electrical grid. We probably overall need to expand the grid by about half. And half and expand, generating by about half. And there are certain parts of the country like the Front Range, Arizona, Texas in the south, going up to roughly Richmond, that probably need to double their grid as soon as possible, because if you don’t have enough electricity, it’s really hard to have meaningful manufacturing.

The problem in the United States is we don’t have a grid. We’ve got one that’s basically from the middle of the Great Plains West, from the middle of the Great Plains East, and another one in Texas. But even that makes it sound like it’s more unified than it is, because almost all utilities are state mandated local monopolies. So they all have their turf, and all of them have to individually make a case for expanding their electricity production, because that cost ultimately has to be passed along to someone else.

One of the reasons why I’m so interested in things like small modular nuclear reactors is if you get the tech folks to pay for that, then all of a sudden you get the power and you don’t have to go through all the normal regulatory rigmarole because you have to, as electrical utility, prove to your regulator that, what you’re doing is in the best interests of your end consumers and until you have the manufacturing capacity, it’s hard to make the argument that you need electricity to make manufacturing capacity.

So it’s a very chicken and the egg thing. The easiest way to get around this would be for state and regional electrical authorities to loosen up the ability of one electrical mini grid to provide electricity to another. That would do two things for us. Number one, it would increase the amount of transmission we have within the system, allowing power to go from where it’s generated to where it’s needed.

And second, If you’re in a rural area that’s not likely to get, say, a major chip’s factory, you could still build a power plant and export it to an urban center that is likely to need a lot more electricity, and all of a sudden you can get someone else to pay for your electricity development in your own region.

So that is where I’d say the shortfall is. It’s a solvable one. It’s just one that we need to do as soon as possible. Because if we say, wait ten years and the Chinese are gone, then we have to do this all from scratch with less money, less labor, and everyone trying to do everything at the same time.

And if you think inflation was uncomfortable for the last three years, nothing compared to what that environment would be like. All right, that’s it for me. Take care.

Fentanyl Isn’t as Lethal…What Happened?

How about some positive news to start your day? A study was just released showing that fentanyl deaths in the US peaked in 2022 or early 2023 and have been declining since.

The decline in fatalities can be attributed to a few factors: less potent doses, fewer users, safer consumption methods, and more widespread availability of Narcan (Naloxone). Despite these improvements, this crisis is far from over; the ease with which Fentanyl can be produced makes it a sustained priority for the US.

Regardless, I’ll take my good news where I can get it, especially when it comes to the drug epidemic.

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.

Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Orlando with some good news. The good news is not that I am in Orlando. It’s that the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill has recently released a report that pulls together all the statistics from all the health authorities in the United States. And according to the data, at some point in 2022 or early 2023.

Fentanyl deaths peaked and have been falling dramatically since then, about one third down on average across the country and in North Carolina, specifically down more than half. This is like the first good news we’ve had in the fentanyl situation in quite some time. Quick review. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, so it is manufactured as opposed to grown and processed, which means that it can be produced faster and at a much lower cost than the natural but organic drugs that are processed with gasoline anyway, because of that, the time to target to get it into the system is a lot lower.

And Graham, for Graham, it’s something like 500 times as powerful as cocaine or heroin. And that means a lot of people have shot up with it and just died. And it has been one of the leading causes of death in the United States for the last several years. So a one third drop is amazing news. We can probably attribute that drop to four main factors.

First of all, the Mexicans who are producing this stuff, this is not coming from the cartels. This is coming from small mom and pops that are basically cooking the stuff up in a garage. And those folks have not been interfacing directly with customers. There’s a few supply chains for distribution between them and their customers. And so it took them a while to realize that they were just killing everybody.

And that’s bad for business. So when they make it into, say, pills, they have bit, which are then, you know, dissolved or crushed or whatever. They’re making them less strong. So less than one third of the dose that they used to have a few years ago, giving people a chance to, you know, not die. Second, for the the addicts in the United States that are dying from fentanyl.

You can only die once. And so if enough addicts do this drug, then the remaining addicts, you’re like, Maybe that’s not the high I’m after. Which brings us number to three. It’s like it’s. It is the high that you’re after. Maybe I shouldn’t just pop a pill or inject it. Maybe I should crush it, turn it into something I can smoke, and that way I can meter how much goes into me.

Those three things combined have really contributed to a significant drop in lethality. And then finally, there’s something called Narcan, which is an anti narcotic drug that you can give to somebody who has overdose. And it’s now not just available in hospitals. You can actually get it and take it home with you. So if you have a friend or a loved one who you know is going to overdose, you can have the Narcan standing by and hopefully revive them in.

Those four factors have really helped out. Does this mean that the fentanyl crisis is over? Oh God no. Again, it’s a synthetic. You can cook it up in your garage. And even if every single drug lab in Mexico were to vaporize tomorrow, the technology is so easy. We’re talking about, like, middle school to high school chemistry here that it would just pop up somewhere else like and say, I don’t know, Oklahoma or Illinois.

So this is part of the drug milieu. Now we’re not going to get rid of it. All we can do is hope to cope with it better than we’ve been doing so far. Still, I’ll take my good news where I came.

The Russian Reach: Why Leadership Doesn’t Matter…Until It Does

Despite the short-term emphasis placed on the title of president, chancellor, or prime minister, the reality is that leadership typically has minimal impact on the trajectory of a nation. The real movers are geography and demography; however, sometimes a leader can be the exception to that rule.

If you take the US, it’s clear that geographic security enabled a flexible and powerful military. If you look at German history, constant neighboring threats lead them down a different path. Demographic structures carry influence in all spheres of life. Younger demos can drive consumption and inflation, while an older, wealthier demo fuels investment and stability. Again, geography and demography are structural realities that are often “untouchable” by a singular leader.

And yet, there are pivotal moments when a leader (or single decision for that matter) can change the course of history. We’re talking about instances like Churchill’s stance during WWII or Zelensky’s defiance in the opening week of the Ukraine War. And now, Trump is pulling the US from its post-Cold War holding pattern and plunging it into a deglobalized system.

Trump’s leadership, coupled with his ability to appoint unqualified officials with little opposition, is a symptom of the disintegration of both major US political parties. Which means we’re entering a period where outside forces, like Russia, can weasel their way into American politics.

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 here. Coming from Colorado. Today we’re launching into our new series on what the hell is going on in Washington. Over the last few weeks, The Donald Trump administration has taken a number of steps that I don’t think pushed the MAGA agenda at all. And can’t be explained away as incompetence or toddler syndrome or whatever you want to call it.

Something else is up. It seems like the actions were designed specifically to tear down American power over the long term. And so I want to start by talking about why normally leadership just doesn’t matter. All countries are shaped by two things, their physical environment, their geography and their population structure, their demography. You understand those two things.

You can understand the challenges, opportunities and tools in front of a country. So, for example, if you’re a country like the United States that is surrounded by oceans, you don’t have to spend a lot of resources on defending the homeland, especially not on land. And armies are expensive, both in terms of money and in terms of manpower.

So if you are freed up from that, you can then instead invest your people in doing something that will actually earn income and invest your military and naval forces, which, while not cheap, can be wherever you need them to be. And so you basically get a much more mobile military force, and you get to choose the time and the place of when a conflict happens, rather than the other way around.

Another good example are the Germans. They are surrounded by potential competitors the Dutch, the French, the Austrians, the poles, the Russians, the Swedes and off the coast, the Brits. And so no matter where the Germans look, they face a potential threat. And throughout all of German history, until very recently, the goal was always to consolidate as quickly as you can, develop as quickly as you can, just in a panic, and then eliminate one of the threats so you can focus on the others.

And this generated a very hostile, erratic, rapid German economic and security policy that eventually triggered a couple of wars. That ended the European order, as it was until World War Two. And it was only with the creation of the European Union and NATO where the Germans were no longer, viewed themselves as surrounded by enemies but surrounded by allies, that this finally changed, of course, that shaped their economy because they still have that built in.

And so they focused everything on industrial activity because that’s what they knew. And because the frantic miss in the culture never really went away. They just focused it differently, which was triggered some of the economic problems that the Europeans are having. Now. You can play this for any country. Open borders means you have to have an army and you’re going to be a little nervous if you’ve got a rampart between you and everyone else, like, say, the Chileans versus the rest of the world.

With, the Andes Mountains, you get a culture that can be very productive, a pretty laid back because you’re not facing any sort of threat on a regular basis. And then everybody in between. That’s for demographic structure. It’s a question of balance among people who were under the age of 18, roughly 18 to 45, 45 to 65, and retired that first category.

Those kids to expensive. And you have to house them, clothe them, feed them, educate them. And for most adults, raising your kids is the most expensive thing you will ever do. Certainly more expensive than purchasing a house, but it does generate a lot of consumption, which generates a lot of economic activity

Next group, 18 to roughly 45. These are your young workers. These are typically your parents. And just like with the kids, lots and lots of consumption because they’re buying homes, getting educated, and, buying cars. So we have a relatively low value added workforce, but still a lot of consumption and a lot of inflation, and you got people 45 to 65. The kids are moving out. The house has probably been paid for and they’re preparing for retirement. They’re also paying a lot of taxes because they’re experienced workers that are very productive with high incomes.

So this is the tax base. This is the capital stock. This is the stock market. And then when you retire whatever assets you’ve accrued, you want to protect them. So you move out of things that are relatively risky, like say the stock market and go into things that aren’t like cash or property, and then you basically just whittle away at it until you pass on.

Every country has all of these categories. The question is the balance. If you have a lot of young people, you have a consumption led system that tends to be inflationary. It’s also easier to build an army. If you have a more mature system, you’re going to have a little bit more capital, a lot more industrial capacity. It might be easier to do a Navy.

It’s got an advanced population 45 plus. The capital you have is massive, and your ability to invest in technology and be making yourself a technocracy is a very real possibility. And usually countries that are in this stage have some amazing growth patterns. But it’s not from consumption, it’s from investment, it’s from technological breakthroughs. It’s from the application of those technologies.

And then eventually you retire and everything stops. What does all this have to do with leadership? Well, very little. You can’t leader your way out of your borders without a war. And while wars do happen, consolidate and whatever the territory on the other side is a multi-generational thing. And the consolidation usually matters more than the conquering.

So when you look back at, say, American history, as we expanded westward through the continent, we don’t remember the politicians like Paul King, those who came before that actually expanded the borders very well. We think of the politicians that successively turned the country into something else. On the other side of that, we think of Eisenhower. It’s a different sort of work.

It takes time, and it takes a lot longer than any one leader ever has. Even if you happen to be a despot who happens to be a genius and you take over at age 22 and you rule your entire life, this is the stuff not so much of decades, but of centuries. Same and population policy. Let’s say we had a really robust population policy that really encouraged large scale childcare to allow workers to both work and have kids.

Well, that’s not going to hit economic headlines for 25 years, because you have to wait for the kids to grow up and become adults themselves. Leaders just don’t change that. But every once in a while, we have a moment in history where the decisions that are made in the short term don’t just matter. But after everything. A great example is Churchill, during the Blitz, could have surrendered, cut a peace deal with the Nazis.

But no, he decided to make his country and unsinkable aircraft carrier and pray that the winds of time would be favorable. It was a gamble. It worked, and history would have turned out very, very differently had he, not me personally. I put Zelensky’s quote to Ukrainian president of, when the Chechen hit squads were closing in and the United States offered evacuation.

He says, I don’t need a ride. I need ammo. That changed the course of the war. And without that decision, this conflict in Ukraine not only would have been over a lot longer, we’d have a lot more dead Ukrainians than we have now, but we’d already probably be hit deep in a war on the plains of Poland.

We’ve been at one of these moments for arguably the longest window, in human history, for these last 35 years. Ever since the Cold War ended, the world has kind of been in this weird little transition period where the old globalized system of the US, built to build an alliance to fight the Cold War, was mostly maintained, and the structures of globalization on the economic side were mostly maintained.

But we’ve all been kind of a holding pattern to see what the United States was going to do. And most of my work, most notably my first book, The Accidental Superpower, is about this dichotomy and how it can’t last, and that sooner or later, the United States is going to move on to something else, whether it’s something internally, something regionally, the Western Hemisphere, or sees something shiny elsewhere.

And this whole system was going to end anyway. But no world leader, no American leader really took advantage of that moment to do something or take us in a different direction. Until now. And that person who is doing something is Donald Trump. But rather than translating American power of this moment into a new system that will last for decades, he seems to be tearing it down.

Which is why we’re doing the series. There’s something else to consider about why Trump has been so successful and is faced so few obstacles. And it’s more than just the fact that the United States military is more powerful than everyone of the allies combined. It has to do with what’s going on in the United States, because our political system is not stagnant.

It evolves, too. And every generation or so, the factions that make up our political parties move around. And in those periods and these windows of opportunity, in these transition moments and these interregnum politics become unstuck. So I would argue that what we’ve seen in the last 15 years is a complete disintegration of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, other apparatus and loyalty system.

In that environment, MAGA was able to hijack and take over the Republican Party quite successfully, whereas the Democrats more or less just dissolved as an institution. We’re in the transition process here. We are not seeing anything close to what the end result will be for the next period of American history. But at this moment in time, the institutions which are based on the parties, which are based on the people are in flux.

And I think the best example I can highlight for that is what’s gone on in the US Senate. No American president has ever had all of his cabinet appointees approved. You have to get confirmed by the Senate with a majority except Donald Trump and phase two. And without a doubt, this is the least qualified cabinet we have ever seen in American history.

And every single one of them have gotten through. We’ve gotten a guy who pledged publicly to turn the FBI into a vindication engine, specifically to prosecute the president’s opponents, confirmed. We get a vaccine skeptic who’s a complete nut job confirmed. We get an agricultural secretary who’s never been on a farm, confirm, and we get a defense secretary whose military experience is limited and has absolutely no experience in policy.

Whatever confirmed all of them got through, all of them got through quickly. All of them got through easily. This is not my army. This is not the power of Trump’s charisma. This is an issue that we are in one of these moments where the institutions are in flux, most notably the political parties in this case. And until that firms back up, the Senate has basically abdicated responsibility and that provides opportunities for others who are much more organized, who are not going through this sort of flux to exercise their will.

Which will bring us to the Russians. And we’ll tackle them tomorrow.

Of Birds and Bugs

There are two issues we’ll be discussing today: Bird Flu and the new disease outbreak in Congo. These topics are unrelated, but there is a lesson to be learned in their comparison.

A severe bird flu outbreak has egg prices soaring and shoppers reconsidering their breakfast choices. The newly appointed Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins proposed a handful of ideas to end the crisis. After consulting experts, she abandoned those ineffective ideas and opted for an aid package that was a bit more informed.

Over in Congo, a new disease has broken out and at the time of recording over 400 people had been infected and a significant portion of those were killed. Usually, the US would have a swift response with boots on the ground trying to get to the bottom of this; however, new Health Secretary RFK Jr. has gutted those teams and crippled the United States’ ability to respond. Oh yeah, and Trump also severed ties with the WHO.

Rollins doesn’t have the background or knowledge on how to address a crisis like the bird flu, but she put forth the effort to learn and change: that is something I can live with. RFK Jr. lacks the same competencies necessary to carry out his role as Health Secretary, but he is too rigid to even attempt to learn and adopt new strategies: that is a level of incompetence that risks catastrophe.

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 Colorado today. We’ve got two completely unrelated topics I’m going to weave together into a little story. The first is here in the United States. It has to do with the bird flu epidemic that has been raging through U.S. agriculture for the better part of three years now. It’s now gotten to a point where it’s just as bad as the really bad one we had back in 2015.

If you remember that far back. Egg prices have more than doubled. They’ve gone up by like 40% just this year. And there’s no reason to expect that to go down at all. Considering how much inflation was a part of Joe Biden’s defeat, relevant topic. Trump, of course, said on his first day he’d put things in place to fix it overnight.

That’s not how it works. So let me explain what’s going on. With the first phases of what the Trump administration proposed, and then we’re we’re actually going to go. So, the chicken industry is a split between boiler chickens, which are the ones that you like, buy pre-cooked at the store, chicken parts or whatever. And then layers and the layers, of course, make the eggs two different functional species.

The bird flu situation is affecting the layers, not the broilers.

Now, among that these chickens because you know, they’re laying eggs have to be kept in a relatively confined place in order to generate the eggs in sufficient density so they can be harvested, safely, effectively, and above all, from a biosecurity point of view, cleanly, however, birds are filthy, filthy creatures.

They are the rats of the sky. And if you have any interaction between them and the outside world, they interact with wild birds and bird flu is a wild thing, and it is endemic in every bird species on the planet. And so any sort of interaction risks getting the bird flu from the wild species into the domesticated species that are laying the eggs.

And that’s really the core of the problem here. Also, the turnaround time from first infection to death is typically less than 72 hours, with only about 48 hours between first symptoms and death. So if you become aware that the chickens in your enclosure that just even a few of them are sick on Monday, you’re going to have the majority of your chickens either diseased or dead, by Wednesday.

So when, Brook Rollins, who is the new agricultural secretary, who has no experience in agriculture whatsoever, I’d be surprised if she owns a pair of boots. She may have never set foot in Iowa before. Not sure about that one. Anyway, her policy background is very limited. She’s a highly ideological person. She serves as an advisor to the Texas governor Abbott.

And basically the sum total of her, recommendations to him is that, other jurisdictions, not the state, other jurisdictions shouldn’t raise taxes. It’s not that I really disagree with that statement, but that’s not a lot to hang your hat on if you’re going to be agricultural secretary, when that is the most scientific of the various, agencies we have.

The way it works in the U.S government is you’ve got three tiers, at your top, you got your political appointees. Those come and go with every administration down below. You’ve got people who are technically, political appointees, and the president does have the authority to remove them at a whim, but they’re generally staffed with people who know what they’re doing with a lot of experience in the industry or the sector or whatever.

It happens to be. A lot of scientists, a lot of logisticians. And usually these people are allowed to go from administration to administration because they’re largely apolitical jobs. And there’s nowhere where that is more true than the USDA. However, they have all gotten caught up at USDA, just like in every other, agency.

And those are people have all been purged. So the people who know how to make the trains run and keep the birds alive, they’re gone. Rollins comes in, she inherits this bird flu epidemic, and she casts around for ideas. And the first thing that comes out of her head, because it was her first briefing, was the biggest issue going in agriculture right now is let’s improve biosecurity.

Let’s improve medication of the birds. And let’s, do mass vaccination of the birds. Now, the surface, none of those sound like dumb ideas, but they’re very, they’re very freshman mistakes for number one. The vaccine. Yes. A vaccine for bird flu does exist, but it’s not through full trials.

It’s never been tested out in a commercial flock. So that’d be kind of a question. Also would cost about a dollar per bird and it has to be injected manually. Now, I don’t know if you guys have ever gone chasing chick chickens, but your typical bird operation in the lane industry in the United States has 3 million of them.

So you have to pick up a chicken, inject it, carry it to another bio, secure facility to drop off, do that 3 million times. Well, folks, from the point that a bird gets the ability to generate eggs to the point that you retire because it can’t anymore is only 18 months, so basically they’d be retiring faster than you could immunize them. Second medication. There is none. Bird flu triggers total organ failure in under 72 hours. So that just kind of goes out the window. And then there’s just improved biosecurity. That’s like I hate to point out the obvious, but if your life savings is involved in a bird laying operation, your biosecurity is the damn best you know how to do because there isn’t a medication and there isn’t a vaccine.

Oh, one more thing on the vaccine. It’s a live virus. Vaccine? Like most vaccine, this is not an MRI, and this is not one of the more advanced ones. It doesn’t leave any biological components in your body. And, you know, you vaccine skeptics, you can suck it. But it does leave, virus residue in your system, which means that that bird will then, at the end of its life, test positive when you’re testing it for bird flu, if you want to export it.

So you can’t export it either. So it’s a dollar on the front end. It’s administration costs, it’s transport costs. And then on the back end you can’t get it’s money to money from your retired birds. Anyway, the churn in this system just means that if you detect bird flu, you just have to kill everything in that enclosure.

And from the point that you introduce a new chick to an enclosure, to the point that it’s laying eggs, that’s only six months, you can’t catch up with that with immunization anyway, despite the fact that the Trump administration has purged everyone who knows these things from the top tier of USDA, Brooke Rollins, despite her faults, isn’t stupid. And so she went out and spoke with people who knew things in the industry, and she realized that the medication and the, immunization angles of her original idea weren’t feasible.

And so she backed away from something that would have just cost the industry a huge amount of money and probably reduced the number of laying eggs, which would have driven inflation higher. Crazy idea. She’s still working on biosecurity, which I don’t think is going to go anywhere, but she was told by Trump to get this under control, she had to announce something.

She realized that everything it could be done was being done. She announced something that was $1 billion, which, you know, in the world of Trump, world is, not a lot of money. And it’s going to provide a little financial support for, the ranchers and the farmers so that maybe, maybe, maybe they can bring some more facilities online.

It’ll have no real impact on inflation or legal aid numbers. This is someone who is out of her depth and is trying to become more schooled on the topic, and is doing the best she can. It’s a degree of incompetence that I can live with that story one. Story two is happening over in Congo where we have a new disease.

It looks like hemorrhagic fever. Whether it’s the Crimean Congo version or Ebola, we don’t know. In fact, the people who have had it tested negative for both of those. It’s something new. Apparently, it’s already infected over 400 people. It’s already killed over 50 people. It seems to burn out in 2 to 4 days, which is a really fast time to kill people, especially if the mortality rate continues to be over 12%.

It seems to be so far. Now, normally this is where Department of Health and Human Services would come in. Normally this is where a group that’s called the Epidemic Intelligence service would rush over there, help set up quarantines, get some tests done and find out what we’re dealing with. But RFK Jr, who was our new HHS secretary, gutted the Epidemic Intelligence Service on his first day.

And he doesn’t like the medical industry and he doesn’t like vaccines. And so the IHS is basically running on two out of its four wheels right now and doesn’t have the capacity to participate. The second organization we rely on is the World Health Organization. But one of the first things the Trump administration was several contacts with the W.H.O..

So as regards this new disease variant, we in the United States are in the complete dark, and we are relying on other countries to come up with information and choose to share it out of the goodness of their own hearts. Brooke Rollins is someone who’s in over her head and is trying to learn. RFK Jr is a waste of skin.

When you look at people either in health or in agriculture, they have a very low tolerance for bullshit. Because if you screw up the health system or if you screw up the food supply chain, people die. But now we have two different examples, two polls, if you will, of what can happen based on the core intelligence and the personality of the person you put in charge.

Competence would be nice, experience would be nice. That would be amazing in both of these sectors. But we’re seeing one approach that involves learning on the job and one approach that involves pushing your own preconceived notions that are based on no facts whatsoever down the throats of everybody. One of these is not a disaster. The other one very well is likely to become one.

Venezuelan Crude Is Off the Menu… But You Can Still Get It Around Back

Venezuelan oil is getting the boot from the US. Well, kinda, sorta, not really. Let me walk you through what’s going on.

Biden allowed Chevron to import Venezuelan crude to help lower gasoline prices, but Venezuela couldn’t meet their election-related obligations and the deal failed. Regardless, Biden’s motives were misguided as Venezuelan crude is such a small portion of US imports.

Trump came along and revoked that Chevron deal and is now focusing on deporting Venezuelan migrants (many of whom are highly skilled).

Regardless of the policy shift, global oil markets won’t be impacted. Venezuelan crude will likely continue to flow to the US, even if it takes a pit stop somewhere else for a “rebrand” – a page out of the Iranians’ playbook.

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 Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about Venezuela specifically. The Trump administration has recently revoked an operating contract that allows, U.S super major Chevron to import about a quarter million barrels a day of Venezuelan crude. This is unwinding some of the things that I think was one of the dumber things that the Biden administration did.

To explain that I need to go back and explain why the Biden administration did what it did. Okay. So step one, if you go back to the transition from Trump one to Biden, both leaders were basically competing for our affections. And in doing so, they decided to do the Great American political thing and bribe everybody. So in his last month in office, Donald Trump pushed through a or two months in office.

He pushed through a stimulus program that put $1 trillion into Americans pockets. And the first thing that Biden did in his first three weeks is do the same thing. So with $2 trillion of stimulus spending, cash put in everyone’s pockets, even though Covid was already and fully in the rearview mirror, and there was no sign that we needed the stimulus at all, that $2 trillion generated inflation over the next two years, which eventually caused Joe Biden some political headaches.

And then he started to obsess about bringing inflation down. But, the Biden team, like the Trump team, has no one on it that can really do math. So they kind of did their best guess based on ideology and past history, of which Joe Biden has a lot, in order to decide what needed to be done. And Joe Biden settled on gasoline prices.

He specifically believed that as long as OPEC was producing large volumes of crude that could then flow throughout the world, or OPEC and other producers, that gasoline prices in the United States would stay under control, and he wouldn’t have to deal with that political headache. It’s it’s not that the math is completely bad. The U.S does have a semi-open energy market, specifically the shale oil that is the vast, vast, vast majority of American energy production is super light and super sweet.

It’s not really hard to refine, but the American Refining Complex was designed for something else back in the 1980s and 1990s when we knew knew that the global crude stream was getting uglier and more sour and more polluted. We retooled our refineries to be the best in the world, which would allow them to take any crude, no matter how crappy, and turn it to any product, no matter how nice.

Most notably gasoline, diesel, jet fuel. Well, shale Revolution came along, turned that math on its head. And so now the United States exports a lot of light, sweet crude and imports a fair amount of heavy sour crude and then makes bonkers money on the difference, taking in cheap crude and turn it into a high end product. Anyway, that was kind of lost for him.

And so he just thought more was better. So he looked at Russian crude and was like, you know what? I don’t like the Russians. And I want them to suffer for the Ukraine war, but I we need their crude to keep gasoline prices in the United States under control. So let’s work out a regime where they can still export their crude, but they don’t get all the cash.

And it was, you know, squirrely, in the case of Iran, something similar. Let’s bring him in partially from the cold so they can officially export more crude in order to keep crude prices under control. And then, of course, the same with Venezuela and now with Venezuela. It was a little bit more of a match up because Venezuelan crude is that heavy sour that U.S. refiners really crave.

But we’re only talking about total production here of under a million barrels a day, with the exemption that was granted to Chevron only for less than a quarter of that. Most of the heavy crude that the United States imports comes from Alberta, our Canadian neighbors. So that’s like 3 million barrels a day. So apples and oranges. Well, not opposite oranges, but like apples and trees full of apples.

In addition, 250,000 barrels a day in a good month, compared to a total market in the U.S. of 20 million barrels a day, didn’t really move the needle very much. Joe Biden got some crap deserved it for, cutting the deal because it basically said that, in exchange for this oil access, the Venezuelan government has to have real elections.

And they didn’t. So basically, Maduro, who is the dictator down in Venezuela, got all the benefits without having to pay anything. And now the Trump administration is, in my opinion, rightly unwinding this. But of course, we have to talk about what’s happening now with the American Venezuelan relationship, because while Biden was all about gasoline prices and probably did it wrong, Donald Trump is all about illegal migration and is probably doing it wrong, because most of what he has been hammering on the Venezuelan government with is about taking back, Venezuelan migrants.

Now, the Venezuelans have a special dispensation from the US government. So while they may have started a flow that was originally illegal, most of these guys are now registered. Now, part of it is really real political asylum, unlike folks who are applying from, say, a Central America. And as a rule, Venezuelan migrants tend to be much higher skilled than what everybody else is crossing the southern border.

Keep in mind that until Hugo Chavez, who was Maduro’s, predecessor, an idol, until Chavez took over, Venezuela in the early 2000. This is one of the most skilled labor markets in the Western Hemisphere, probably third or fourth behind the United States, Argentina and Canada.

So they’re the kind of migrants that we say that we want. Most of them were in some sort of legal system. And now, the Trump administration is sending them home. Maduro agreed to take them. He has no problem butting heads together for people who might be, his opponents. And that’s going to be a little bit of a drama down the line now that the people who tried to get away are now back.

And at the end of the day, the energy thing probably isn’t going to matter too much anyway. One of the things that people forget about crude refining is because the US complex is so good.

Not a lot of places can process Venezuelan crude. So what will probably happen next is what happened before in that, Venezuelan crude will probably be purchased by some Chinese state major, which will be then sold to a middleman and then sold back to the United States and marketed as something that’s not Venezuelan crude. Will be a little bit of a markup because of the middlemen, but the flows will continue.

We’ve seen something very similar, with Iran in the past as well. Anyway, that’s what’s going on. See you next time.

The Russian Reach: Series Introduction

There’s been a slew of US policy changes that the Trump administration has laid out. I’ve done my best to explain away as many as I could with conventional political reasoning, but I’m not sure I can anymore. Today, I’m going to be laying the foundation for a multi-part series on what is happening in Washington.

The list of policy changes is far too long to mention every single one, but some of the heavy hitters are: Ukraine aid suspension, trade tariffs, government firings and bureaucratic disruptions, and major foreign policy shifts. Again, I’ve tried my best to justify these moves using all the frameworks at my disposal, but when the things I’m seeing can’t even be rationalized away with MAGA ideology or incompetence…something more concerning could be shifting in US governance.

This series will explore the departure from traditional American policy that we’re currently seeing, what that means for the future trajectory of the US, and what the actual f*** is going on.

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 Colorado. This one is going to be awkward. I am absolutely not a conspiracy theorist. In fact, I last five years, spent a substantial amount of my time, talking people down from theirs. But, so much has gone down in the last just couple of weeks that I am having a hard time ascribing changes in American policy, both at home and abroad, to a more conventional theory.

This isn’t MAGA policy. This isn’t policy incompetence on the part of the administration. This is something else. And bear with me as I kind of lay it all out. And, we’re going to see where it goes. I’m recording this on the 4th of March, and the two big pieces of news for the day are.

Let’s start with, Ukraine. The Trump administration immediately suspended or suspended, effective immediately. All military aid of all types to Ukraine, including anything that was in transit and had already been, budgeted, paid for and piloted and moved, with the equipment that the Ukrainians would have receive for the United States, they probably could have kept fighting until mid-summer, without help.

Now, a lot of things are up in the air. Geez. Let’s start with explain why this isn’t a Maga thing. Well, people say that all this money has been given, and like, there’s a big truckloads of cash go is like. No, I mean, the total value of the stuff is somewhere between 100 and 50, 285 billion.

But think of it this way. When you clean out your closet at home, to make room for your new stuff after Christmas, and you take it to goodwill. How much do you say it’s worth when you fill out that little form at goodwill? What it’s worth when you bought it. And, what the military has done is basically gone through their old stores of things they haven’t used literally in decades.

Reported them for the cost that it took to to build them and then adjusted for inflation and for about 70% of the total number that is the donation. And so you’re talking about old equipment we weren’t using that was marked at a value that’s probably higher than it ever was worth. Of the rest, 10 to 15% is ammo and more legitimate equipment legitimate is and current.

And then the rest is cash. So really you’re talking about a total value given that’s well under 40 billion, chump change. In addition, the Russians have been pointing, nuclear weapons at me, not just my entire life, but since the 1960s. And they have abrogated every arms agreement that the United States has ever signed with them in every conventional arms agreement they have ever signed with any country, ever.

In the modern era, if there is going to be a war between the United States and anyone over the next three decades or so, it’ll probably be with the Russians. So for having the Ukrainians basically take our hand-me-downs and fight the Russians to a standstill, that’s a national security win and an economic win by any possible measure.

And so I’ve seen that just twisted around and dropped is a problem. And that’s before you consider that we now have, the Trump administration, not casually, but actively, deliberately breaking relations with all of our closest allies up to including the United Kingdom. And now regular calls throughout Congress, not just for this or that, NATO leader to resign or Zelensky of Ukraine, of course, but actually withdraw the United States from day to all completely.

Now, you might be able to say that there’s a strategic argument to be made here, or at least a discussion we had, and that’s fine. But this is just like one of like 20 things I want to talk with you about today. This you know, all by itself this is a problem. The second big one that happened today is the imposition of a 25% tariff on everything coming from Mexico and Canada, Mexico and Canada.

Our number one and number two, trading partners and, everything, every everything that we do in the world of manufacturing is integrated with them across borders. And so by doing a blanket tariff, lots a lot warmer out here than I thought it was by doing a blanket tariff. What that’s basically done is made most American manufacturing, non-viable almost overnight.

No, there are certain types of manufacturing that may in time prove to be exceptions to this. There’s some very high end stuff, like in medicines, maybe. But if it involves anything that you think of as manufacturing, you know, an assembly line, a production floor that basically doesn’t stop, but it’s now no longer viable versus important stuff that comes from beyond North America.

So the biggest winners of this by far are the Chinese, where they already have competing industrial plants from running. And if you look forward to the world that we’re moving to, where the Chinese are disintegrating because of the demographic situation, we have a limited amount of time to prepare for a world where Chinese industrial plant just isn’t there.

And what Trump did by threatening the tariffs a couple of months ago and now implementing them today, is even before today, new investment into the United States in North America had frozen completely because no one knew what the situation was going to be. He introduced what we like to call regulatory uncertainty into the situation. And now that the tariffs are in place and people know what the math is, no one’s going to come here because the economic case is now been destroyed, and that will set us up for a situation years from now when the Chinese system finally fails, where we don’t have an industrial front in place and we’re going to have significantly higher inflation. Trump, of course, loves tariffs. And also today he said he’s going to put a 40% tariffs on all agricultural imports. Now, the United States is a large country that grows a lot of its own food. We’re the world’s largest agricultural exporter. We have a very wide variety of climate zones, but we don’t have all of them.

And so if you go into any supermarket, especially if you’re looking at things like fish, fruits or vegetables, a huge proportion of those in any given season is coming from a different country. We already have a food inflation problem here. And, now we’re going to have a significantly larger one. Those tariffs are supposed to kick in in April.

And Trump has said farmers start producing, but the farmers can’t produce most of the stuff that we import. Because swims in a different sea comes from a different climate zone or relevant to this moment in March looking around me at the snow. You’re not going to grow a lot of food in Colorado right now, so it has to be brought in from somewhere else. Same is true throughout the United States. In winter, we’re particularly vulnerable to Mexico in that. So we’re gonna have a 40% tariff on top of the 25% tariff that’s already there.

That is enough to push all by itself, probably 10% of the American population. Beneath the poverty line. And we’re just getting started.

Let’s talk about those that Department of Government efficiency that Musk is after. Trump is a great marketer. I will give him that. But, you know, the total value of everything that Musk has routed out of the federal bureaucracy that supposedly was all that, you know, really like $30 billion for all the disruption out of a $7 trillion budget that’s so small as to just not be worth my time to even look at.

Or if you look at the employees that he’s fired, right now it’s only about 1% of the federal workforce, and you would have to purge about 20 to 25% of the federal workforce just to knock 1% off of the budget. Most of what’s going on in the budget is entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. It’s not discretionary spending.

And of those workers, you know, there’s been a lot of splash. But you got to understand how organizations work. There’s basically three categories of workers. At the top, you have your political appointees, which are themselves tiered between the folks that are always political appointees that are let go at at the end of every ministration, you have the ones a step down who, it’s their job to make the trains run on time.

And they may be politicized, but they have a lot of back experience in the topic. And then the next level down. While technically political appointees, they’re typically never let go at the end of the administration because they’re apolitical technocrats who make operations function. Now the president has the authority to get rid of all three layers, and he’s gotten rid of Trump, has gotten rid of all three layers throughout every individual agency in the government, even those that are not political at all and have nothing to do with foreign affairs. So, for example, the Department of Agriculture, those firings, if it has to do with provisional employees or permanent employees, are generally have already been rolled back by the courts because the Congress has not given the president the power to fire most of these people.

And so every time one of those cases has come up, they’ve basically the courts have ruled in favor of, the employees. Now that goes for the second class, categories as well, which are the comp patrollers and the internal auditors. You know, these are the people who make sure that fraud doesn’t go into the system and that foreign interests can’t penetrate the system.

Trump fired all of them. Doesn’t have the authority to try any of them. It doesn’t achieve anything from a policy point of view. It doesn’t achieve anything for savings point of view. They will all in time be reinstated, undoubtedly, unless Congress intervenes and says, yeah, they need to go. But what it’s done is, is it stripped out the internal system that the U.S. government used to prevent foreign influence from penetrating?

There’s nothing about that that matches with MAGA goals. And then the third category are not your provisional employees. Those are the ones that are new and don’t have full civil service protections. Those might be able to get fired a little bit. But the temporary ones, the government does a lot in a lot of places. And you hire people temporarily to do things that don’t need to be done all the time.

So for something that’s near and dear to my heart, the Forest Service, you know, staffing all the national parks that surges in the summer, firefighters, those people have all been let go. So when we get to summer driving season this time, in a couple of months, a lot of the national parks probably aren’t going to be able to open.

And if we have forest fires years, fuck, that’s going to be awful for fighting forest fires without forest fires. Oh, anyway, well, that’s inconvenient. There’s a lot of things that these provisionals do that it’s a little bit more important, like maintaining the nuclear arsenal. Trump just fired them all. That’s doesn’t serve a mark, a goal, or in the food supply system.

You know, people who are in USDA, Department of Agriculture, you know, they don’t tolerate a lot of bullshit because they know if they screw up, people die, like by the tens of thousands. We’re no longer testing food safety because those are temporary jobs. And so we no longer have an eye on the bird flu epidemic because we’re not able to collect the information that we need.

Now, the midterm solution to all this is to just hire a bunch of contractors to do it all. But that means you’re paying for the old bureaucracy that they’re not using, and you’re paying extra cash to create a new private bureaucracy. It’s it’s expanding the budget, not tracking it. And we’ve seen that in the headline figures, with all the firings, with everything that Deutsche has done, the U.S. budget expenditures have gone up compared to the Biden administration.

Has to dodge. We basically have a lot of people without congressional authority and without security clearances that have gone into very sensitive databases, sort of posting things on social media. We’ve got lists of government assets around the world, some open, some covert that have just been released to the public. Stuff like this is if it gets in the hands of other states, that’s like the five year effort of espionage.

And it was just handed out. That doesn’t serve anyone’s agenda in the United States. What else? I got to look at my list. I’ve got a long one.

All right. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stopped investigating terrorism in order to focus on illegal migrants. What? Department of Health and Human Services isn’t even holding the meetings that are necessary to start the process for selecting the next flu vaccine, which has the medical community freaking out because they rely on these private groups to, at no compensation to themselves, advise the government as to what type of vaccine is going to be needed based on the flu strains that are circulating.

And since HHS also cut connections with the World Health Organization, we’re just kind of guessing at what is out there and literally relying upon the kindness of strangers to tell us what we need to get ready for.

All right, USAID, that’s the agency for International Development. That’s got a lot of crap for doing some strange things. That’s fair. But if you’re not going to invade or occupy a country, USAID is the primary method that the United States uses to influence countries around the world. You can call it whatever you want. The bottom line is, when it’s not present, the Iranians, the Chinese and the Russians absolutely dominate the space because they will step in with relief support that is loaded with intelligence operations.

And all of a sudden they’ve gone from meeting USAID head to head to having a completely open operating environment. And so, of course, the Iranians and the Russians sent a joint letter to the Trump administration thanking them for making life so much easier for them. Or in the Defense Department, we canceled all operations against Russian cyber activity.

That includes, defensive operations on our part, as well as offensive operations to disrupt their ability to hack the United States. The Russians maintain a very active cyber presence. They’re not just hacking our elections and our media and our power grid and our water and our food supply and the stock market. They’re going after you specifically because part of the Putin alliance that rules Russia includes organized crime out of Saint Petersburg.

And so most of those cyber things are linked to Russia in one way or another. And we have basically decided just to lay back, open our legs and let whatever happens happens. This isn’t MAGA policy. This isn’t toddler syndrome. This isn’t this isn’t even incompetence. This is too much, too soon, too holistic. This isn’t an abdication of American power.

This isn’t mismanagement. This is a deliberate disassembly of the building blocks of American power and security and safety. This isn’t anything that I would think that any American would ever want, much less orchestrate, which has pushed me into the realm of some computer, some conspiracy theories. I think we now need to consider that the Russians really have penetrated the white House.

And while I think it’s a stretch to say this is like a manchurian candidate sort of situation, there are too many things happening that seem too tailored to hobble American capacity, long run, and everything that was on this list is something that the Russians have tried before. NATO is something they’ve been trying to destroy since the 50s, and now we have a possibility of the US just walking away.

The military has been the bulwark of global security, and so gutting it from the inside is something they would love to see. Our Intel system has been the canary in the coal mine, and it appears that Trump is either not receiving or not reading the daily briefs at the agency produces for him every day. The food supply situation in the United States has long been the world’s safest.

And now we’re not even testing to maintain it. The demographic of Russia is one of the main reasons why the Russians are facing such a bleak, long term future. But if you interfere with the vaccine schedule in the United States, you can start increasing the death rate in Americans not just under 20 but under five, and start to equalize that situation.

This is some heavy stuff. And what we’re going to be doing in the next few videos are exploring all of this from the Russian point of view, how they see the world, how they influence the world and given the chance, how they would redirect American policy to serve their interests. I would love to say this is hypothetical, but I’ve already got a dozen examples in addition to the ones I just shared with you about how that is already happening.

So buckle up, because for the first time since I started doing this 25 years ago, I’m actually worried for the United States. We’ll talk about that too.

Will Trump Pump the Brakes on Greentech?

Both in the US and globally, the green energy transition has been all the rage for the past few years. With President Trump’s second term kicking off, how will it impact the green transition domestically and beyond?

For the green folks outside of the US, the impact should be minimal. Since the US doesn’t manufacture most Greentech components or provide much financial support, Trump’s influence is (mostly) contained to the US. But the story isn’t so pretty for those in the US.

The main challenges for the green transition in the US are transmission infrastructure and financing. Federal support is crucial for developing the infrastructure to get the energy from where it is generated to where it will be used. Trump could make this development and coordination process much harder. Wind and solar projects require more robust financing than a traditional fossil fuel plant, so cuts to federal incentives or subsidies could make these projects unviable.

Without federal backing, many of these green projects would stall. Private investors might try to step in, but they can’t match federal funding levels. Trump has the ability to significantly slow down the green transition, but at least that doesn’t extend beyond the US.

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 today. We’re taking a question from the Patreon page. And that’s specifically what sort of impact can Donald Trump have on the green transition, both in the United States and wider abroad? Abroad, very, very little. The solar panels aren’t made here. The wind turbines are not made here. And U.S. financial support for anyone else’s transition is well below $1 billion a year.

So, you know, you know, whatever. It’s all about what would happen here and here. The the federal government has a lot of, means for changing the way the green transition works. A couple things to keep in mind. Number one, green technologies, as a rule, require a great deal more transmission infrastructure because where most people live is where it rains.

And so you can grow your own food. We don’t have a lot of desert cities. So in most cases we generate power with coal, nuclear, and natural gas relatively close to where we live. And so transmission for most power plants is well under 50 miles. But most of the places that are very sunny or very windy are not within 50 miles of where we live.

It’s in the Great Plains, it’s in the desert southwest. And so you have to build these pieces of infrastructure to generate power well away from where people are. And then you have to wire that power to somewhere else. And that often means crossing jurisdictions. And if you cross a economic or political jurisdiction, the regulatory burden becomes more robust.

And it’s up to the federal government to try to smooth that out. So if all Donald Trump does is not smooth things out, becomes a little bit more onerous to build green tech anywhere because you can’t hook it up to a source of demand, then that’s problem one. Problem two is much bigger. You see, if you’re doing a conventional, facility, whether it’s coal, natural gas or a nuke, only about one quarter of the cost of the facility is in the upfront construction.

And then linking that up to the grid, most of the rest is fuel, especially for coal and natural gas. So as a rule, it varies based on where you are and how close you are to the fuel source. As a rule, about 80% of the cost of the lifetime cost of a coal or natural gas facility is the fuel. You basically buy it and burn it as you go. And so with that sort of model, you only have to finance the initial 20% that it’s required for the construction of the facility and looking it up to the grid and everything else.

You have an income stream to defray and ultimately overpower the cost of the fuel moving forward. It’s not how green tech works. The whole point of solar and wind is that you don’t have fuel. The fuel is free. Well, that means that most of the costs, almost all the costs are upfront. Over two thirds go to the construction and linking it up to the grid.

So the degree of financing you need megawatt for megawatt is more than triple what you need for a more conventional fuel system. Now, one of the things to keep in mind in the United States is that capital costs have roughly increased by a factor of four since 2019, as the baby boomers have retired, and the money that they used to have in stocks and bonds, that fueled the sort of capital environment that we had ten years ago just no longer exists.

They’ve all been liquidated and they’ve gone into T-bills in cash, which is driven up the cost of financing for almost everything, including power plant expansion. Well, if you’ve seen the cost of capital increase by a factor of 4 or 5, and you have to finance three times as much for wind and solar as you do for core natural gas, you can see where the problem is.

This is normally where the government would step in with concessionary deals on whether it’s on taxes or directly on financing in order to help bridge that gap. And so all Donald Trump has to do is say, I’m not going to finance this stuff anymore, and a lot of it is going to go away, even if, as isn’t the case in the desert southwest or in the Great Plains, solar or wind are already cheaper on an all in cost basis over the entire life of the project.

But that’s not the number that matters. Part of the problem that I’ve always had with the green communities, they keep using this thing called levelized cost of power, which shows how over the life of a project, the cost of solar and wind has gone down and gone down and gone down. And it has. But they assume that there’s no problem with intermittency.

So like when the sun sets, solar doesn’t work anymore. If you pair a more realistic cost structure because you know you want electricity after the sun goes down. Hello. With financing the issue, then the federal presence in the financing world really is critical. And even in projects that make a huge amount of sense, not just environmentally but economically.

If you can’t get that financing right, you can’t have the project. Private industry can step in, but it’s going to be a hard sell to do financing for something on concessionary terms, for something that it’s going to take longer to pay out as compared to a colder natural gas plant. And you might get local and state governments kicking in some for political and environmental reasons.

But there’s no way that they can compete with the sheer volume that the federal government can come up with. So we should expect a lot of these projects to slow down quite a bit. Even if Donald Trump doesn’t call them out by name is something that he doesn’t like. You interrupt the financing and you simply don’t get much new construction.

Will the US and Canada Actually Merge?

Listen, I didn’t want to make this video, but too many people asked for it…so here we go. What would a potential merger of the US and Canada look like?

The US won’t be invading Canada and there won’t be a nationwide Canadian petition for US membership, but how would it happen? It’s more likely that individual Canadian provinces – like Alberta and Saskatchewan- would secede and apply for US statehood.

These two provinces are young and wealthy, meaning they’re going to have to put the rest of Canada on their backs (financially speaking). They already have strong economic ties to the US, so a merger isn’t as far-fetched for them. The rest of Canada would likely destabilize if those provinces left, due to aging demographics and financial struggles.

For the US, incorporating Canadian provinces would mean a significant reshaping of American politics. However, that doesn’t mean it would be all that difficult to add them in; it’s a much easier process adding states than amending the constitution.

Regardless, I don’t see this happening anytime soon. There’s too many financial, political, and demographic factors at play. But if it did happen, both countries’ political and economic landscapes would dramatically shift.

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.

All right. I didn’t want to do this video, but too many people on both sides of the border have asked so what would a merger of the United States and Canada look like? All right. Let’s start with the simple thing. The United States is not going to invade Canada. There is no serious talk about Trump. He hasn’t even really joked about it.

So let’s just put that to the side. Canada has just shy of 40 million people. So if it was to join in a single piece, it would be right up with California as our first or second most populous States. But it has a demographic picture that’s kind of a mix. And so what would be far more likely to happen?

Because the idea that a majority of Canadians are going to petition for U.S. membership is a stretch. We’ll be far more likely to happen. Is individual provinces of Canada would secede from the Canadian nation, and then apply for statehood for the United States.

The first two states to watch are the two that are youngest demographically, that are the richest in per capita terms, that export the most commodities per capita, and are already fairly culturally linked in with the United States.

And those are Alberta and Saskatchewan. And if you’re looking at a map of Canada, keep in mind that everyone lives in a thin strip along the southern border. So you’ve got British Columbia on the Pacific. You’ve got some mountains, big mountains, and then Alberta and Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the third of the prairie provinces. And then you crossed something called the Canadian Shield, which is about 1000km of very rugged terrain, heavily forested, where there’s only one road and one rail line.

Before you get to eastern Canada and in eastern Canada, you’ve got the population bloc of Ontario and Quebec, which are the bulk of the country’s population. And then fringed around them are something they call the maritime territories, which are provinces, but lightly populated. And, basically, I’m overstating this, so apologies. Heavily populated by retirees. So from from a financial point of view, there’s not a lot there.

Where the money is, is Ontario and Quebec, the two most populous provinces? British Columbia, which has a big population around Vancouver and serves as the Pacific Gateway and then Alberta, which is the energy hub. Saskatchewan is kind of a little bit of the energy hub. And then a lot of agriculture, just like Alberta. What would happen is Alberta and Saskatchewan or Alberta or Saskatchewan would leave, the Canadian nation, which is legal in Canada.

You just have to have a plebiscite that was affirmed by A90 ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court quite some time ago. With regard to tobacco separatism. Anyway, the reason that these two provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, would leave is largely financial. When Quebec was having all of its fits in the 70s and 80s and early 90s about secession.

The the what? The deal that was struck was that Ontario, which at the time was the richest and the most populous province, would basically pay Quebec to just stop it. So, Quebec has basically been paid for the last few decades to remain part of Canada and not have secession votes. It’s gotten more and more expensive because Quebec’s birthrate, is among the lowest of the major.

It is the lowest of the major provinces. And so the whole province has already functionally slid into obsolescence. The problem is, in Ontario. The birth rate has been very low for a long time. And if it wasn’t for the huge surges of immigration, which have had other complications.

Ontario has now aged to the point that if it wasn’t for huge surges in immigration which generate their own problems, Ontario wouldn’t be able to pay to keep, Quebec in the country anyway, but it is still aging very rapidly.

And of late, Canadians have pushed back against this open door immigration policy, which hasn’t been necessary for economic reasons. But now, culturally, it’s kind of hit a breaking point and everything has slowed significantly, which means that Ontario is now rapidly aging again. And within five years, Alberta will be the province that is expected to pay for, Quebec to remain in the country with a little bit of help from Saskatchewan.

The maritime provinces have already aged out, and if the two most populous provinces age out, there is no way that Saskatchewan and Alberta, which collectively have less than 7 million people, can pay for the rest of Canada to continue to exist unless they just become destitute. That’s the financial argument for why you might see secession in the prairie provinces.

And that’s before you consider that every individual Canadian province, trades more with the United States, and it does with the rest of Canada. And that is true for none of them more than it is for Alberta. So you’d actually solve a fair number of problems if Alberta applied and Saskatchewan applied for American, statehood. Now, the question then is what happens next?

Because these are the two richest bits of the country. And if you split British Columbia off from the rest of the country, because now the prairies have gone a different way, it basically devolves into fourth world status very quickly. It’s industry is already wildly noncompetitive, and basically what has kept B.C. afloat for the last several years is capital flight coming in, most notably from China to be processed in BC and then spread throughout the Canadian economy?

That would stop if there was no land connection. The only other business that you really have in BC is it serves as the entrepot for Asian exports coming into Canada. If you use the super port in Vancouver, repackage everything on the rail and send it east. If you can’t get through Alberta and Saskatchewan. That’s not going to work either.

So BC looks really awful in that circumstances, and the rest of Canada out east doesn’t look great too, because basically it’s a retired country that looks worse than most European demographics. So. If all of these other provinces, either in combination or independently, were to ask for statehood in the United States, we’d have to do some really hard math as to whether it would be worth it.

Picking up a half a dozen states that economically are almost destitute. Basically, you’d be adding a half a dozen mississippis. I’m not sure we would be willing to do that. And that’s before you consider the politics of it. By the way, the United States does political math. Saskatchewan and Alberta would probably be considered 1990s style Texas Republicans a little bit more libertarian, socially moderate, economically conservative.

They wouldn’t get along with today’s MAGA all that well. But the rest of Canada, especially BC and Ontario and Quebec, would be of the Elizabeth Warren branch of the Democratic Party. And getting that through Congress might be kind of interesting. Now, that said, adding states is not as complicated as amending the Constitution. You want to amend the Constitution, you need two thirds vote from both houses of Congress.

And then in three quarters of the states, legislators legislatures have to ratify it. You want to add a state, you just need a simple majority. So you just need a simple majority of Congress. You don’t ask the states at all. And then the president signs off just like a normal bill. So if if if if if if we get to that point, Canada will very quickly become a political flashpoint regardless of what politics looks like in the United States, because you’re talking about potentially adding ten provinces or ten states to the United States, a system that’s 20 senators and about the same number of representatives as California has, which I believe is around 50 right now. So a significant shift in the balance of power, that would completely re fabricate how we have our politics. Now, if that happened in a year, wow. That would be all kinds of explosive, because the United States is in the midst of a pretty deep political reorientation, by itself. But at any time that, you have that sort of disruption, you’re going to change the political math by how the country works.

And then and then you get to talk about how things like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, which are the three of the four biggest line items in the U.S. budget, get re fabricated when you add so many people who are already retired. It would be a hoot. Don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon, but if it was going to happen, that’s how it would go down.

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