The End of U.S. Military Deployments?

A group of Marines loading into the back of a C-130 aircraft

Just because the US intervened in Venezuela doesn’t mean that America will be abandoning its global military posture.

The US maintains military deployments in Japan, Germany, and South Korea. Don’t think of this as imperial overreach; think of it as a low-cost force multiplier that prevents bloodier conflicts down the road. Should the US withdraw from these positions, things would likely get ugly…and quick.

The US is the only country with the ability to project power globally, and these optimally-sized deployments help extend that reach.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, avoiding the crazy winds out there. Through with you inside. We’re taking questions from the Patreon crowd about the Venezuelan intervention and the rest of Nicolas Maduro, the former current. I’m not sure how that works out now. Venezuelan president. Anyway, he’s going to go in jail. We’ll never hear from him again. 

The question is, is, is this a prelude to a general disengagement from the Eastern Hemisphere and closing down all the bases we have there? He’s like, oh, let’s let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first. The United States currently has fewer troops stationed abroad than at any time since the since World War two. We had a surge with the war on terror. 

We’re back down to a pre, like the lows that we had in the early 2000. And it’s important to understand that the United States footprint globally is actually quite limited. Right now we have about, let’s called 100,000 troops abroad. Most of those are concentrated in three areas. You’ve got the largest contingent, which is in Japan. The second largest. which is in Germany and the third largest, which is in Korea, especially closer to the DMZ. All of these serve as force multipliers for the United States. Everything else is a very small contingent, maybe a naval base here and there that has a few hundred to a couple thousand people that are basically there to help the carriers operate. 

But the way World War Two ended, we already have places like midway, for example, which is U.S. territory or access to the United Kingdom, which has their own naval bases that we just kind of rent. And so the, the need for the United States to maintain a far flung Imperial style military deployment just doesn’t exist. If you see the United States back away from the deployments we do have, it means that we have made a very clear strategic decision as a country to foment a war and so that we can participate in the next one. 

And lose a few tens to hundreds, thousands of troops. So, for example, if we walk away from Japan, Japan is the anchor. And because of the way that the islands in the Pacific are position, it means that we basically give up the ability to influence the Asian mainland and the western third of the Pacific, which includes Japan and Korea and Taiwan and China and Singapore and Indonesia and Australia. 

And if we decide to walk away from that, we’re basically saying that this whole area can evolve on its own, maybe generate a new hegemon, that we will then have to come back and deal with decades from now, basically setting up something similar to the rise of Japan in World War two. If we walk away from Germany. 

Oh my God. Oh, God. Okay, so every time the Germans are responsible for making their own decisions, they start acting like a country or something. And as a large country, the largest of the European states by population, economy set in the middle of the continent, it will naturally try to influence the areas around it. And that is exactly what set everybody on the course to World War One and World War Two. 

And so to do that deliberately, to set up a repeat of the world wars in Europe, strikes me as something that would not be in American interest. And that’s before you consider the fact that the Russians have been pointing nukes at US my entire life, and I’m now 50, 52 birthday coming up. That strikes me as immensely unwise. 

One for the low, low cost of 30,000 troops stationed in bases that are nowhere near a front line. You can basically control the strategic destiny of a continent that’s cheap. Third, Korea, you draw those troops back. Forget about the likelihood of a war in the peninsula, which is would be very likely at that point. North Korea has nukes pointing at us, with the range to reach us. 

So your permanently now putting Minneapolis, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles under a nuclear threat and defending against that would require an order of magnitude more cost, than simply maintaining 20 to 25,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula. So really, the three big deployments we have right now are there for very good reasons, mostly in terms of controlling the strategic environment, and because not having them there would require us to take a defensive position in our hemisphere, which would be extraordinarily more expensive and set up the situation for war down the road. 

Okay, so that’s the United States. Now let’s talk about everybody else’s deployments. 

Okay. That’s all of them. Here’s the thing that most people forget. Deploying troops in the thousands, much less tens of thousands a continent away, is very difficult, requires specialized logistics and decades of practice and infrastructure development. And so we are the only ones in the modern era that does that. The last time any countries did it at scale, it was before World War Two when we had the Japanese Empire, which we, to be perfectly honest, modeled some of our stuff, and the British Empire, which of course we modeled some of our stuff off besides that in the modern era, and nobody does it now. 

Part of this is policy. The whole idea of the Cold War globalized system was that we will pay to create a world that keeps you safe is an exchange. You allow us to write your security policies. And that has been the basis of the American alliance going back to 1946. But the other part is just the sheer expense. 

By creating a globalized system, we gave everyone access to the globe and all the economic goodies that come from that. And trade and access to commodities and markets the world over. And they didn’t have to have the military for it. So most of them never even bothered to try. And so the world’s second and third largest navies are the Japanese and the Brits, both of which work hand in glove with the United States. 

And if we decided to withdraw from the Eastern Hemisphere, those two countries, as well as a number of others, would have no choice but to develop that capacity. Now, they wouldn’t do it in two years or five years. This is a generational thing, but eventually we’d have a half a dozen navies that had regional, maybe even global reach, and it would look a lot like 1929. 

I would argue that’s something that we don’t want to do, because doing it the first time was really expensive in men and lives in the United States honestly got off cheap because it was most of the fighting was over there rather than over here. Okay, let’s talk about the the big countries, more specifically China. People keep pointing to the fact that they’ve got a large Navy unit, and they do and they do have about, 50 ships that are capable of operating more than 600km from the shore. 

But even if you ignore the first island chain, which really hems them in, that doesn’t give them very much, because the Chinese don’t have basing rights in places that are useful to them. So when you look at the United States, we’ve got Japan’s second most powerful naval power on the world. Where we stage ships, we have midway, we have places that are allied in the North Atlantic basin, whether it happens to be Italy or Spain or the United Kingdom or Iceland. 

We have global power projection, in part because of our territories and in part because of our allies. The Chinese have no allies, so they’ve gone out trying to build what they call a string of pearls model, where they develop friendly ports along the route that they want. And so they get along okay with Malaysia. They basically bought Cambodia. 

And even though it has a coastline, they’re trying to build port there. They’ve got some friendly relations with Bangladesh and Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. And so the idea is they can use their short haul ships to hop from base to base to get all the way to the Persian Gulf, where they, where the oil is. 

And of course, everybody, because of pirate reasons, has a small base in Djibouti. But here’s the thing. If one of those gets broken in a hot war, every ship west of that is lost. The Chinese have tried to do it on the cheap, and that means it’s really easy to unravel. And so even if the United States were to find its vessels, say, stuck in the Indian Ocean, they have enough range to get out. 

The Chinese don’t. And so I’ve never really been worried about the Chinese naval build out. Let’s talk about the Russians. The Russians aren’t a naval power. They’re not an air power. They’re losing their space capability. Within a decade. Pretty much everything that they have that’s not ground base is going to be gone. They just lost the manufacturing base to maintain it, much less expand it. 

But they still have a large army, over a million men under arms. And every month, they’re bringing them another 20 to 40,000 men into the fight. That’s awful. If you’re on Russia’s border. And that’s the situation that the Ukrainians are struggling with right now. But if you’re not on Russia’s border, it’s actually not all that bad because you have standoff distance where you can use drones and air power. 

If you’re another country back, you know, you really don’t have to worry about the tanks coming either. By the way, the Russians have almost run out of tanks, which is crazy. They started this war with 20,000 armored vehicles. They’re down to probably less than a quarter of that now anyway. Bottom line is that their their exposure is huge, but their ability to push back that exposure is very, very limited. 

And their ability to use naval forces to protect power is basically zero. Now, they still have a handful of ships, but they’re split into four different bodies of water the Black Sea, where they can’t get past Istanbul unless the Turks allow them, and everything that does get passes. Relations with the Turks go south. That’s lost. They’ve got the Baltic Sea, but that is now completely a NATO lake. 

At this point they’ve got the Arctic Sea, which is their their most powerful fleet is up there. But the problem is it’s a long way from anywhere. And they have to get by Norway and Iceland and Scotland and the United Kingdom, the United States, all of which are superior naval powers on that, but one that Iceland doesn’t have a military. 

But everybody else could probably do it by themselves at this point, even without the United States. And then they have the Pacific Fleet that is based off of, Petrobras, which is basically a city you can only fly to on the peninsula. And of course, the Japanese are there. They could potentially be some things in the code Vladivostok, but that is literally surrounded by Japan, world’s second most powerful navy. 

And even if all of the Russian ships were in the same place, the Japanese could still easily take them out because they’ve done that before. So the ability of the United States to project power is huge, in part because of its geography, but also because of its allies. The Chinese are blocked in by geography, the Russians are blocked in by geography, and neither of them have allies. 

So we’re in this weird situation where the United States is considering a full scale withdrawal from everything, which will guarantee higher defense costs and longer, long term security challenges. This is one of the things that the people who are really pro isolation tend to miss the the footprint that we have right now is almost perfectly optimized to not have to spend money or lives. 

As an added benefit, you also get to control the security architecture a huge part of the planet. You pull back all that goes away.

Venezuela’s End: Peter Goes Squirrel Killin’

squirrel laying on a log

Following the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, I’ve had a ton of theories and ideas flood in. So, it looks like it’s time for a good old-fashioned squirrel killin’.

Some of the theories (aka squirrels) that we’re going to be killing today are: Venezuela was a credible drone/military threat to the US, Russia was waiting for an excuse (like this) to attack the US, China might use this as justification, and that this was just a warm-up for Iran.

As you can see, no shortage of squirrels here.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody Peter Zeihan here coming from Colorado. It’s above 50 degrees, so I think we would go for a hike. Anyway, a lot of folks have written in with a lot of questions about what’s gone on in the aftermath of Venezuela. For those of you who have been in a coma over the last weekend, Delta forces went into Caracas and grabbed the president, Nicolas Maduro, and brought him to New York to face arraignment, where he is facing, narco terrorism and conspiracy charges that date back over a decade. 

We’ll never hear from him again. Anyway, lots of people had lots of questions about what this means. So the point of this video is to do what I call squirrel killing. So coming up with these arguments that people think might be have something to them, show why they really don’t what the real issue is. So let’s start with the big one. 

And that’s the idea that part of the reason why the US, went after Maduro is because of the fear that, Venezuela could be used as a military base to attack the United States, particularly with drones. Short version is. No, first of all, there are very few drone systems on the planet that have the range that is necessary to cross the Caribbean. 

You’re talking over a thousand miles here and hit the United States. Of the ones that could, most are American. But the Russians don’t have models like that. The Chinese don’t have models like that. Ironically, the Ukrainians now do. Pretty sure they’re not going to want to attack the United States. That just leaves Iran, which has the showerheads, which the newer ones do have probably barely the range that’s necessary. 

What they lack is decision making capability and real guidance. 

And so when you program a showerhead, you have to tell it what routes to follow and where to drop its payload. And in the open ocean, there’s nothing to follow. So technologically, there really isn’t a weapon system that is set for this task. And even if there was, the first city that you’re going to hit, the only one of size that you’re going to hit is Miami. 

You know, we all have our opinions about Miami, but I don’t think any of us like, oh, Miami. That’s militarily critical. Yeah. No. So, you know, blowing up some hotels on South Beach is not the sort of thing that the United States is going to be intensely concerned about. What it would do, however, is trigger an adverse reaction in the American political system, which would lead to massive American counter strikes on whoever was behind it. 

Because clearly, the Venezuelan government, the Venezuelan economy can’t make a biplane, much less a drone. So not that one. What’s next? 

The Russians have been itching to have an excuse to attack the United States. And this is it. No, the Russians are locked down in a war that has been moving incredibly slowly. At the pace they’re going. They’re not going to conquer Ukraine, this century. And they need to really finish it up before they run out of troops in just a few years. In addition, the Ukrainians recently have been on counter attacks and have reclaimed a number of cities, including, you ask, and there just isn’t any Russian spare capacity to do anything else anywhere. They’ve even pulled a lot of troops out of not just the Far East, but off of the NATO border in order to focus them on Ukraine. And if if they were stupid enough to think that they could do otherwise, let’s say they stage some weapons in Cuba, for example. 

Number one, the Cubans would not go for it after Venezuela. And the Cubans are pretty sure that they’re next, and they’re desperate to find a way to avoid an American attack. Staging Russian weapons all 1963, much less launching them, would guarantee the end of their regime because the Soviet Union is no longer exists, and post-Soviet Russia, in its current form, really can’t do a thing to protect any of its allies, whether that is Iran or Venezuela or Cuba. So no. And if if that were to happen, I can guarantee you that the president not just Donald J. Trump, any American president, would then make ending Vladimir Putin at the very, very top of a very short list of things to do once Cuba was neutralized. And if there’s one thing Vladimir Putin values above all else, it’s his own skin. And every time in the past he has been personally threatened, he has backed down, especially when it comes to relations with the United States. So No. 

One more thing on the Russians. You know, it says doesn’t react well to threats, especially if the threats actually make us bleed a little bit. So if you think back to, say, Sputnik or the Cuban missile Crisis, the US massively overreacted and it caused the Soviet Union a series not just geopolitical defeats, but global humiliation in their inability to counter what the United States did. 

And Putin doesn’t just know this. Putin has lived this, so he will never do something that is intended as a direct strike on the United States. You always work through third parties. He will always work to turn us against one another. That’s one of the reasons why the Russians intervened in the elections. That’s one of the reasons why they both support Trump and oppose him. Russian propaganda is very active on all sides of all ideological debates and especially the culture war. So, you know, careful where you’re sourcing, no matter who you are. And the goal of the Putin administration is very simple to get the United States to lash out, to get it to react badly, to get it to attack, but not Russia, to get them to do someone else. Which is one of the reasons why Greenland is featuring so hot and heavy right now, because the Russians are actively working now to get the Trump administration to attack a NATO ally. Don’t do it. All right, what’s next? 

Okay. Next. Squirrel. The idea that the Russians, the Chinese and maybe others will use, the United States grabbing of Maduro to justify military action in their own theaters. Can’t rule out what people will say, but this is certainly not going to nudge them in a direction. Be purely rhetorical. Let’s start with the Russians again. They’re in a full fledged war where they’ve redirected all of their military assets to one theater, and they’re not doing all that well. 

Also, we’re talking about a war where the Russians have literally set up rape camps and establish a cabinet level officer to assist and coordinate the mass kidnaping of children in the thousands from the occupied territories. We have over 100,000 documented war crimes. It is difficult for me to wrap my mind around what else the Russians feel they need justification to do in the Ukraine war. 

So, you know, it might make it out in a press release, but it’s not going to move any decision that they’ve already made. The second one is China, of course, gets a little bit squirrely, but still, I don’t think it’s going to change their meaning. If the Chinese thought they could do a lightning raid overnight and overthrow Taiwan, they would. 

But that’s not how advanced technocratic democracies work. Also, if they thought they could do it, they probably would have done it already. Keep in mind our discussion of military deployment capability before the Chinese don’t have it. The Russians don’t have it. No one really has it, except for the United States into a much, much, much, much lower degree. 

The French and the Brits, who mostly focus their deployments on territories they already control part of their other colonies of their empires, if you want to call them that. So, keep in mind that every war that the Chinese have fought on land since 1949 comes down to just two basic conflicts. One with the Russians, over an island and one with the Vietnamese where they had their asses handed to them. 

I’m not suggesting that the military of China is incompetent today. I will point out, however, that it is in the process of being massively purged and to think that their order of battle actually matches what they can do is a bit of a stretch. But the bottom line is that, vitriolic, rhetoric against Taiwan is bread and butter to the Chinese Communist Party, especially these last eight years, as she has basically purged everybody in the country. 

So if they start using some North Korea style rhetoric and not only wouldn’t be new, but it also has not shaped strategic policy to this point. Basically, these are authoritarian, expansionist, neo imperialist powers who are not constrained by rule of law or allies. They don’t need justification from anyone to attempt what they want to try to do. 

Their only constraints are physical, of which they have many. What’s next? 

The new president, Rodriguez of Venezuela, said that this was all Israel and the Jews……..What’s next? 

Okay. What else? That Venezuela is a warm up for the real country. Iran, which is clearly next. Probably not now. Cuba. Cuba’s probably next, and we’ve already dealt with that in a previous video. But Iran’s a very different situation. Well, the United States certainly has the military capability of interfering in Iran’s oil shipments, because you could either stop them at Kharg Island, where everything is loaded, or the Straits of Hormuz, which is a narrow passageway out of the Persian Gulf that everything has to pass through. 

That’s a lot different from taking up the political leadership. See, Venezuela wasn’t exactly a one man show, but it was definitely a strongman system with a tight cluster at the top that helped him loot the country. And then very little below. There may be a mass movement, of chavistas, but they’re not organized in the way that say, the Democratic Republican Party is. 

So, like, if someone were to take out the American leadership at the top, even every member of Congress, there’s still the states and localities, and there’s 2 million elites in the United States in the political class. That’s not the case in Venezuela. You had a couple dozen. And that’s certainly not the case in Iran. Two big reasons why Iran is probably not next. 

Number one is that elite, probably 10,000 mullahs are part of the clerical class, and it’s going to take a lot more than some Delta forces guys or a bad flu season to take them all out. So even if you could get the Supreme Commander, you wouldn’t be able to exercise the regime. The second problem is geographic. 

Tehran is definitely not coastal in the way that Caracas is just a few miles from the water. So you’re talking about inserting over a couple hundred miles of desert mountains? No. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say desert mountains. A lot of these are not desert. It’s populated. 

And as the United States found out back in the 70s during the Carter administration, that if you try to send a bunch of helicopters to pull people out, there’s a really good chance that it’s all going to end very badly, just like it did with the hostage rescue back in 1979, I think. So much more durable regime. Much harder to get to. And I just don’t see that working. Doesn’t mean that there can’t be an angle for American policy on Iran that’s going to evolve because of this and become much more muscular and threatening. All of that is absolutely possible. But this isn’t a dress rehearsal in any way 

It’s a very different economic, political and strategic challenge to go after Iran.

Why on Earth Would We Take Greenland?

Town of Aasiaat (Greenland) during winter season

Taking Greenland is worse than pointless both economically and strategically. As importantly, Denmark is arguably America’s most earnest ally, and for decades has given the United States anything it has asked for.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a very snowy Colorado. We’ve got about seven inches, so far in about three. More is on the way. Because of everything that’s been going on across the world, and everyone’s talking about what the Trump administration is getting next. And because Greenland keeps coming up over and over and over again, I thought it would be a good time to explain why the United States taking Greenland is one of the dumbest ideas that I have heard in my life. And if you think back in the last 30 years, there’s been a lot of dumb, let’s just go through what the people who say it’s a good idea why those things are all wrong. Number one, we need it for defense purposes, because there’s Chinese and Russian ships everywhere. 

The Russian Navy has been in a not so slow disintegration now for 30 years. And because of Ukraine, where they’ve basically lost one of their entire fleets, now their Arctic sea fleet is the best one that they have. But it is a pale shadow of what it was 20 years ago, much less 40 years ago. And the Russian ability to project power to the North Atlantic simply does not exist. And for that, the United Kingdom is a better counter. 

And we already have naval bases there. Number two, have we in militarize that we can protect power? No, 80% of the country is under permanent ice. Another 5% is moving glaciers. The other 10% is, kind of the climate of, say, the Aleutian Islands, but with a worse winter. No good ports at all. So any sort of infrastructure you’re going to build, if you’re trying to project power, is going to have to be some sort of floating platform off the coast, kind of like what the United States tried to do with Gaza, which was a disaster. 

But you going to be doing this for military vessels? There’s also the question of what would that achieve? Some people say that if you control Greenland, then you control at least part of the Arctic Ocean. Right? The ship between Asia and North America. And while that is true, you’re talking about $1 trillion investment to encourage the Chinese to dump product in the United States. 

That’s a really weird value proposition. And then third is money. People like to talk about rare earths, and they say that Greenland has loads. Well, First of all, no one has, prospected functionally in Greenland yet. So anyone who says they’ve got a lot is just making shit up. 

Second, again, 80% of Greenland is under an ice cap, not a glacier, an ice cap. And even if the most extreme version of global warming happens, you will not be able to meaningfully operate in that zone this century. So you might be able to poke some things on the side that is fair. But again, rare earths aren’t rare. They are byproducts of other mining. It’s not like you can go sink a single shaft to the ground and start pulling up your lanthanides or whatever else you want. No no no no no no no no no no. You need a massive complex to process whatever else is there bauxite, copper, silver, whatever. And because this is a country country with under 100,000 people and none of them live in the places that are probably mineral rich. 

Wow. I’m really getting covered here. You’re now talking about either building $1 trillion of infrastructure just to process metals that you can get somewhere else at a 10th the cost, or shipping all the aura, which would mean a mammoth piece of infrastructure to to handle that kind of cargo. There’s nothing about this that is cost effective. 

And then there’s the issue of what we’d be able to get that we don’t need to have, because Denmark is such a firm ally, they allow us to do whatever we want in Greenland pretty much whenever we want. During the Cold War, we had a few dozen, maybe about 30 or 40 facilities there. 

We have slimmed that down to one, just the station at through. They have made it very clear in Trump two that if we want to go back and reopen any of those facilities or build new ones, they’re happy to help. They’re happy to help pay for it. So there is nothing that we would get from direct control that we don’t already have, except for the headache of managing a remote territory that someone else is already managing better. 

All it would do is wreck the United States’s alliance with the country that argue, has been the most loyal and enthusiastic ally we have ever had. Denmark isn’t like the United Kingdom or France, where they have delusions of their own strength. It isn’t like Australia, where it’s kind of remote. This is a country that’s in the heart of where the North Sea meets the Baltic Sea, and has been the plug that has kept the Russians from having a functional navy for decades. And every time we have called upon them, they have answered, you wreck that relationship. 

And it’s difficult to imagine that we have any alliances where we would still be seen as a trusted partner. And then you’re talking about the U.S. going that alone and having to do everything on the global scale by itself, and large scale excision of American power from Europe. And if you know your history, the last couple of times we decided we didn’t want to work with Europe. 

We ended up going back with several hundred thousand men, a lot of whom didn’t come home. So no, not worth it.

Colombia Avoids War with the U.S.

the statue of Simón Bolívar standing before Colombia’s National Capitol, with the flag waving

Colombia looked like it was in the hot seat following Maduro’s capture, but tensions seemed to have eased following a call between Trump and President Gustavo Petro.

Colombia has been America’s most reliable partner in Latin America for decades, thanks to shared security interests. So, it’s looking likely that cooperation between the countries will continue.

With the civil war wrapping up and a free trade agreement in place, Colombia is poised to integrate more deeply into the North American economy moving forward. As long as they can resolve the drug violence and infrastructure issues.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a snow day in Colorado. It is the 8th of January, and the news looks like the United States is not going to invade Colombia, so. Hooray! In the aftermath of the United States moving into Caracas with special forces and snagging Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Trump administration, Donald Trump himself. 

Rubio, who is the secretary of state, Hegseth, who is the secretary of defense, and several others all started opining openly about what the next steps would be with topics like Cuba coming up. And the president specifically brought up Colombia. Now Colombia’s President Petro and Trump, they, well, they just absolutely loathe one another. They’re both populists, just one from the left and one from the right. 

And Trump has on multiple occasions accused Petro of being a drug lord, which, of course, is ridiculous. But, you know, we have a nonstandard president here and they have an non standard president there. But yesterday, apparently the two of them had a direct phone call for about an hour and it was all smiles. And it ended with Trump actually inviting Petro to the white House to discuss issues of mutual concern. 

And you usually don’t do that for someone you actually hate. Is there room for a deal, to put it in Trump’s parlance? Of course. Colombia has been the country in the Western Hemisphere that the United States has gotten along the best with for the last 60 years. And that’s for a mix of reasons. So let’s start with the, strategic, then go down to the economic. 

So strategically, it abuts Panama. It separates the Caribbean basin in the Atlantic from the Pacific. And as such, any sort of power based in Colombia has the opportunity of mucking around in both basins, just like the United States does. Because of the cocaine situation, the United States has worked with government after government, after government in Bogota to try to contain cocaine situation and tamp it down. 

The folks in Bogota have been thrilled for this because they don’t much care for the cocaine either. The problem is it’s smuggling issue. You see, Colombia is not like a normal country. It doesn’t have a large chunk of flat land that the Colombians are from. Everyone lives on the sides of mountains, so they can be high enough to be out of the tropics, but not so high. 

They’re up in the tundra. When this makes infrastructure very difficult, makes national unification rather difficult. And it means that if you’re in an area that has the climate to grow cocaine like Colombia has, you’re always going to have an undercurrent of rebellion. That rebellion has traditionally identified itself as more leftist or even communist. And so you’ve got cocaine, communists, basically, that have been running around the country since the 1950s. 

And then their primary market is the United States. So Bogota doesn’t like those people. The United States doesn’t like those people. And there’s always been that degree of alignment. Also, because Colombia has lived in a degree of civil war for the bulk of the last three quarters of a century, the population is significantly more conservative on security issues than anyone else in Latin America, because the rest of Latin America hasn’t seen a real war in over a century. 

These are people who understand that guns are sometimes necessary. As a result, they are the odd man out throughout Latin America, where you generally get more pendulum like activities in their politics, swinging between the extreme right and the extreme left. Not in a social sense, like the way we think of it here in the United States. But in a land sense, people who own the land versus those who don’t. 

That pulse is not nearly as strong in Colombia as it is everywhere else. And as a rule, until very recently, it’s been the center right, that has ruled the country. And so, again, tends to get along better with the United States more recently economically. 

As part of a reward, a couple of administrations go under. George W Bush, I believe, decades long cooperation with the United States was rewarded with a free trade agreement. And the Colombians, in bits and pieces, are working on operationalizing that agreement. The reason it’s been so slow is because there was a civil war, and it really only ended about a decade ago. And the country is really in the process now, today of defining what it wants to be in the future. But the fact that the hard work on the negotiations has already been done, and there’s already a free trade agreement in place, bodes very, very well. 

The issue, for both sides and the opportunity is Mexico. Mexico has become so successful over the last 30 years because of NAFTA that it’s moved up the value added scale to the point that the Mexico of today needs a low cost manufacturing partner that looks a lot like Mexico in 1990. And that’s exactly where Colombia is. 

So you’ve got a country with an above average education level and worker quality, for their income level, who now also has a trade deal with the United States. And basically we’re probably going to see if relations don’t blow up in the next decade. Is Colombia being formally or informally folded into the North American trading bloc, which is something that would benefit everybody hugely. 

Are there obstacles? Of course. But if we get the politics right, the obstacles are primarily geographic. Like I said, most of the population of Colombia lives on the sides of mountains. That means building road and rail infrastructure is difficult. But a couple things to keep in mind. One of the few navigable rivers in the Southern hemisphere is actually the Magdalena, which cuts right through the middle of that V. 

So if Colombians can snake down to that river, they have an easy access to it. And they can ship things out to the Caribbean basin and to Houston, Miami, beyond. So there’s a lot to work with. And as the Civil War is now over and we’re entering a new phase of drug interdiction, hopefully the Colombians and the Americans can continue to work together. 

The current picture of the cocaine situation is undoubtedly a little ugly. The issue is that during the Civil War, the government couldn’t fight everybody. So a lot of militias formed up that were loosely allied with the national government, while Fark, that’s that’s leftist communist druggie thing when a different direction and tried to basically run an independent state. Eventually fark was disabled, disarmed, and is no longer really a factor. 

But then those right wing paramilitaries that used to be allied with the government are now basically becoming their own insurgent groups on their own smuggling groups. So it’s ironically allies of Bogota that Bogota once armed, that the United States, once armed, that are now at the core of the drug problem doesn’t mean it can’t be combated, just means it has to be done differently.

Venezuela’s End: Was a Deal Struck?

Two hands shaking in agreement

There’s been speculation that a deal could have been struck between the US and a power like Russia or China that allowed the US to move on Venezuela. Let’s put that one to rest.

What could either of those powers have to offer the US in the Western Hemisphere? Russia is tied up with Ukraine and doesn’t have any meaningful investments in Venezuela. China might have some economic holdings in Venezuela, but they can’t project power far enough to disrupt the US.

So, no. There was no deal. The US acted unilaterally because, well, because it can. And I expect to see the US continue to dismantle Russian and Chinese influence out West in the coming year.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here. Coming from Colorado, it’s, like 60 mile an hour winds outside. So we’re into this one inside. Ever since Nicolas Maduro was captured by the United States over the weekend, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about some of the details. And one that keeps coming up over and over and over is whether this is some sort of deal with the Russians and the Chinese, where the Americans get their way in Venezuela, and in exchange, the Chinese get their way in Taiwan and the Russians get their way in Ukraine. 

Short version is no, that’s not how the United States works. Not that the United States is not willing to make a deal. Not that the Trump administration, of course, likes to make deals. But for it to be a deal, there has to be something that the other side can give you in the in this case, with China and Russia, there isn’t, neither country has the ability to impose any sort of security reality, really, outside of the realm, near abroad, the military’s are very limited. 

The Chinese navy really can’t operate more than a couple hundred miles from her own coast. The Russians may need months in order to surge troops to a place on their border, and they have never demonstrated the ability, even at the height of the Soviet period, to operate outside of hemispheres in meaningful way. So when you look at, say, the Russians like, what is it that they can potentially hand to the United States and Venezuela? 

And the answer is absolutely nothing. I mean, at the height of Soviet power vis-a-vis American power, they were able to put some missiles in Cuba, which generated the Cuban missile Crisis, which is was a massive strategic defeat for Moscow. And they’ve never risen back up to that level again, certainly not in the post-Cold War era. And that’s before you consider that their entire military is now committed to Ukraine, and they just don’t have the ability. 

Now, the Russians did have some investments in Venezuela that is fair, but Venezuela’s oil company was more technically advanced, even after 30 years of degradation and looting than Russia’s oil companies are today. So that investment has gone nowhere. Basically, you had the Russians putting some money in to cover some of the expenses. The Venezuelans or the Americans did the work. 

Chevron specifically. And the Russians got a cut of the profits and some of the oil to some international markets. That’s gone to zero. There is nothing to trade. China sounds like a more productive player in the Western Hemisphere, but everything that they have done is based on investment, basically investing in ports and infrastructure in order to bring raw commodities, whether it’s soy, iron ore out to the coast and then on to East Asia. 

But again, that is something that they can’t do themselves, not that they don’t have the money. Of course they have the money. But the Chinese Navy, well, has almost 600 ships, really can only operate in a very limited distance about 10% of their ships can maybe sail more than 1000km from the coast and operate to a degree that they have been battle tested. 

Very important. But they’ve got foes in Japan and Taiwan and Korea and Indonesian and Singapore. They can’t get past the first island chain. Even if they could, they then be cut off from the whole island. And every ship that did that work would then be destroyed in the Pacific. The Chinese can’t operate in Latin America at all unless the US Navy is providing freedom of the seas for everyone. 

Now, ever since 1992, the US has been moving bit by bit away from that for a mix of military, strategic and political reasons. We haven’t hit the hard break yet where the United States is actively undermining the system. But wow, are we close because we now have the United States going after, say, for example, ships of the shuttle fleet that are working with Iran and Russia and of course, Venezuela. 

So it’s entirely possible that this is the magic year where that all breaks, in which case the entire Chinese position globally goes from being overextended to just be broken. We’re not there yet. That’s a conversation for another day. But for purposes of this question, was there a deal? No, because the United States, now, if it wants to, has proven they can just completely dismantle the entire Chinese position in the hemisphere with minimal military effort. 

And I expect we’re going to see a lot of that over the course of the remainder of this calendar year.

Venezuela Offers Trump an Oil Bribe

oil barrels stacked

Venezuela’s pseudo-newish-kinda leader, Delcy Rodríguez, just offered President Trump 30-50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil. Let’s just call a spade a spade, because this is an overt political bribe.

Rodríguez is trying to earn Trump’s stamp of approval, so her seat at the table is secured (spoiler alert: she’s no different than her predecessors). But this bribe has some logistical motivation as well. You see, the embargo on Venezuelan oil exports has left storage tanks full. And with nowhere else to store the crude, they either have to get rid of it quick or shut down production.

The US has a legal nightmare on its hands, because isn’t this still sanctioned oil? Are the refineries allowed to accept the stuff? Regardless, this oil bribe can either buy Venezuela some time (and secure a new leader’s seat) or mark the end of Venezuela’s status as an oil producer.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all on here come from Colorado. Today we’re talking about the bribe of the Donald Trump announced last night. I think there’s no other way. There’s no other word for it. Are you one on Truth Social and said that Venezuela was going to give or sell? Details were a little fuzzy. Somewhere between 30 and 50 million barrels of crude to the United States to be sold in the US markets, to be accepted, U.S ports to be processed by U.S refineries, and that he personally would manage the sale and, handle the proceeds personally. 

As the president of United States for the benefit of Venezuela and the United States. Details TBD. 

Two things here. Number one, it’s really weird to have a sitting president be really proud of a bribe. But, you know, here we are. It’s a weird, weird world these days. Second, the mechanics of why this is happening. The new president of Venezuela, Rodriguez, is attempting to flat out bribe the American president. 

This is not the first time she’s tried this. She came back in 2019. Remember? She’s also the oil minister and tried to give money to his election campaign. Didn’t work then. Now seems to be working. But she is trying to get the American stamp of approval that she is the thug in charge. She is not any better than Nicolas Maduro or Hugo Chavez. 

She simply is bending with the political winds. Right now, she’s established a far tighter crackdown in just the last three days. The Nicolas Maduro never did, even at the height of the elections. She wants everyone to realize that she is in charge and she has trumps behind her. For her new reign of tyranny. And of course, she was selected because she was very good at looting the system. 

So it’s a really interesting, political bedfellows, whether it will work or not depends on a thousand different things that I can’t predict right now. But let’s talk about that oil. The way oil systems work is you have a production. Well, it goes into a pipeline, it goes to a refinery, the refinery processes it, and then it goes on you typically by truck, train or some other method of transport to end users. 

And the trick is you have to maintain a flow all through there. Because if you have a hang up at one step, the pipeline will then have to divert its shipments off into, say, a storage tank. And storage tanks can only use so much. And for a country like, say, the United States, where we use something like 17 million barrels a day, you’re talking about a lot of flow through. 

Well, if you’re an exporter, you don’t necessarily refine your crude. It’s even more important then, because there’s no place to offload, there’s no local demand center that is strong enough to absorb a lot of the raw crude. So your only options then are tanks. And that’s the situation that Venezuela is in. Now. You see, a couple weeks ago, the Trump administration announced a full embargo on basically anything that wasn’t Chevron. 

And in doing so, tankers stopped arriving in Venezuela. So they had to start diverting all of their export flows to storage tanks. Now Venezuela has more storage tanks than most exporters, mostly because it’s not the exporter it used to be. They used to export 3 million barrels a day. Now it’s less than one, which means they actually had a fair number of tanks. 

But after two weeks, those have basically become full. And we’re now in the point that in the next day or three, if they can’t release that crude onto tankers to take it away, they’re going to have to shut down production because there’s no place else to put it. That’s the 30 to 50 million barrels. Gives you an idea of how little control the Venezuelans have over the intellectual property of their own system. 

They don’t know if it’s 30 million or 50 million. They just need someone, anyone, to take it in any price. Otherwise they have to shut everything down. And here is Donald Trump. So Rodriguez offers Trump the bribe. Trump seems very grateful. And we will find out in the next 48 hours whether or not the tankers will actually take it and carry it to the United States, and whether U.S refineries will accept crude that the president has very explicitly said is still under sanction. 

There’s a lot of legal questions there. And the people who would help untie those legal questions are the experts and, the people who basically do ethics investigations, the United States government, and they have all been fired. So a lot of people going to have to make a lot of really difficult decisions on legal liability very, very, very soon. But that’s the nuts and bolts of the issue. If this doesn’t work out the way that Rodriguez and Trump have identified, then the tankers don’t come. The oil stays in the tanks, and the entire Venezuelans oil sector basically shuts down, with the exception of what they can refining themselves, which is less than a quarter of a million barrels a day. 

So this could buy them some time to figure out something else. Or we could be at the end of Venezuela as an oil power right now.

The US Economy Is (Kind of, Sort of) Growing

Zoomed in image of a 0 bill

Recent data out of Washington shows the US economy is growing faster than expected, but let’s lift the hood on these numbers.

This growth is fragile and uneven. Industrial construction spend is declining, with much of the spend allocated towards AI and data centers. This might boost short-term growth, but it signals that a bubble is forming. We also have to account for construction costs increasing, making growth appear stronger when we’re just spending more for the same stuff. Consumer growth is steady, but only because the top 10% of earners are keeping the ship afloat. The bottom two-thirds of Americans are cutting back as everything grows more expensive.

Growth hasn’t cracked yet, but it’s going to hit harder than necessary when it eventually does.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from a Colorado that’s rapidly melting. Today we’re talking about economic growth in the United States. Specifically, in the last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten new data about how fast the U.S. economy is growing. And it’s at a surprisingly robust clip, something that the white House has taken a bit of a victory lap on. 

How does this light up against all of the forecasts, including from myself, that the tariff policy and the industrial policy of the Trump administration is actually going to lead to slower growth of the long term? We’re at that moment where everyone can have their cake and eat it, too. There’s two big things going on, according to a dissection of the data. 

First, industrial construction spending was still the single most important metric that I follow these days, because it shows what we’re actually building, what we put money into the ground for, as opposed to plans, continues to steadily dip down. We need that number to at least go up by 50%. If we’re ever going to build out the industrial plant that we need to prepare for the end of the Chinese system. 

Instead, the tariff policies has generated so much chaos in the industrial space that that number is continuing down. But that does also generate a certain type of growth, specifically with AI and data centers. Somewhere between 30 and 40% of industrial construction spending is going into data centers right now. And that does generate some high octane growth from the jobs and the construction. 

Also keep in mind that when everything that you used to build something steel, wood, copper is more expensive and were high tariffs on all of those items. Just because it costs more doesn’t mean it doesn’t count as growth. So we should be able to use those inputs to build twice as many data centers as we are. 

But since you have to spend the money on that anyway, it generates the same amount of growth in terms of the consumption of those products. So it makes it look better than it really is. That’s number one. Oh. Yeah. And any time any specific subsector is that huge of a percentage of any major statistic, you know, it’s a bubble. 

Number two, just as important, maybe even more so consumption, consumption has held steady despite the tariffs and the chaos of no one knowing what everything is going to cost the next day. But you have to dig down into the numbers a little bit to, get the full picture. Consumption for the bottom. Roughly two thirds of the population is actually dropping as people cut back as grocery bills and cost of electronics continue to go up. 

The only segment that is increasing their consumption is the top 10% of the population in socioeconomic terms. But here’s the thing. The bottom two thirds of America’s population is only responsible for about one third of consumption, whereas the top 10% is responsible for roughly half of the total. So you can have a small sliver of the population at the top that has not adjusted their consumption, maybe is even spending more now because they don’t care about the tariff increases. 

They’ve got the money to burn. But most of the population is tightening their belts, which is generating lower consumption for them. But because the top 10% consumes so much relative to everyone else, it comes across overall as a steady number. So everyone is right and everyone is wrong, myself included. Growth at this point is still holding up, but it’s becoming much more lopsided, much more dependent on some very, very specific factors that are very clearly already in bubble territory. 

So it suggests that when this does crack, it’s probably going to hurt a little bit more than it needs to. When will that happen? I can’t tell you. If Donald Trump were to stop issuing new tariffs and stop changing the tariffs are in play, I might have a better forecast for you. But we’re now at something like 650 tariff policies for the year to date. 

And everything is just changing too much that there is no confidence that really anyone in the industrial space has an economy right now. And that is very clearly bleeding into the consumer space as well.

US Foreign Policy After Trump

Flags of multiple countries blowing in the wind

Trying to figure out what foreign policy will look like after Trump is a fool’s errand. With no strategic consensus or institutional planning capacity, the US is stuck in a car without brakes, a driver, or a steering wheel.

The US is undergoing a historic demographic transition, but the political realm hasn’t adjusted to this new reality. The bipartisan foreign policy framework that’s been in place since the 40s has collapsed. Trump has dismantled the Republican Party. Democrats lack coherent leadership. Key planning institutions have been gutted. Yikes.

The US is entering a volatile period where foreign policy is driven by instinct or ideology rather than strategy.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all Peter Zeihan here coming from Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon page. And it’s specifically, And I quote, foreign policy under the Trump administration is little, what’s going to happen after Trump? I would love to have a clear answer for you, but I don’t, A couple things to keep in mind. Number one, the United States economy is going through a transition as the baby boomers leave and the Zoomers come in. We’re losing our largest workforce ever, and it’s been replaced with our smallest workforce generation ever. 

That’s going to change the complexion of the economy. That’s going to change what we need to do in foreign policy. From an economic point of view, that is very much in flux. This has never happened in American history before. We are making it up as we go along. Tariffs are part of that. Trade deals are part of that. 

And we haven’t had time yet for politics to rearrange around this fact because we’re still in the opening years of the transition. So that’s problem one for why we really don’t know. Problem two is it the bipartisan nature of foreign policy is gone now, from 1945 until very recently, until probably the Obama administration, maybe even through Trump one and Biden. 

But certainly within the last 15 years, it’s broken. We’ve had bipartisan foreign policy because we had an agreement on what we needed to do. The Soviet Union were the bad guys. We needed the alliance in order to contain them. So the United States used its military to basically buy up an alliance. We would protect you. 

We would allow you to sell your products into our market if in exchange, we could control your security policies in order to box in the Soviet Union. Soviet Union’s been gone for 35 years. We never had a conversation on what should replace that policy. And eventually we knew it was going to fall apart. And under Trump, too, it has fallen apart good and hard. 

But we don’t have a replacement system. Trump might think he has a foreign policy for the ages, but he doesn’t have a successor. And the Republican Party has been shorn of its policy arm. Trump destroyed it and basically made the party a just a campaign function with no talent recruitment, no talent gestation, no policy development. And the Democrats are useless, for so many reasons. 

Anyway, bottom line is, when we go into the next presidential cycle, there’s no successor for Trump and the Democrats really don’t have any rising people. And even if you had a personality on both sides who Is liekly to take over things, there really isn’t an institution in either party that is capable of coming up with ideas for what should be next. 

Nor is there in government, the Trump administration has gutted a lot of branches of the US governing system that help with planning. Just to pick two, there’s an office that basically hunts down epidemics on a global level, but it’s based on science. So one of the first things that DHS chief, Robert Kennedy Jr did was gut it so it could never tell him that he was making shit up. 

And in the US military, we had something called the Office of Net Assessment, whose sole job was to look over the horizon and game out what the next conflicts were supposed to look like, but they made Pete Hegseth look like he wasn’t a very bright boy. And so that office was gutted as well. Things like this had happened in commerce and Treasury and all the rest. 

And so the things that the US government used to do to help the presidency prepare for whatever is next, they’re all gone. So we’re kind of flying blind when it comes to thinking about what the challenges and the opportunities of the future are going to be. And because the parties have not been able to step into that gap for various reasons, we have an inability as a country now to prepare. 

And so any policies that we are going to have for the next decade probably are going to be solely based on gut feelings like Donald Trump or blind ideology that is completely uninformed by modern affairs. That is going to get us involved in a lot more conflicts that are going to be a lot bloodier than they need to be, because we’re not doing anything to prepare for any of them. 

We have been here before, in the world before the World wars in particular. Certainly before World War two, the United States didn’t have a dedicated foreign policy arm in the way that we thought about it during the Cold War. And so we basically had a complete overhaul of what our foreign policy used to be, almost every administration. 

We are now going back to that sort of situation. But in a world that is far more interconnected than anything we had in the 19th century. So, yeah, it’s going to be a really rough, really rocky ride until such time as our political system regenerates and we get some decent leadership who can actually think forward. I would love to think that’s going to happen for the next presidential election. 

I have absolutely no confidence it will, because Donald Trump has a vested interest in making sure the Republicans don’t turn the page. And the Democrats are so chaotic right now, it’s really difficult to see them coming together. We will probably have to wait for a third force, somebody either rising up within the parties or forming a new one to basically take the reins and start us over with a new structure. 

Historically speaking, we have done that many times. But it isn’t always an awkward process to live through, and it usually takes about a decade. So for now, the next few years, this is where we are.

Help Wanted – The US Needs More Workers

Sign reading "Help Wanted" in a window

US labor data shows a slowdown in job growth, but given the recent changes to the Department of Labor, who knows if we can trust it. Regardless, labor patterns are definitely looking off…

Demographics are reshaping the labor market. Swaths of Boomers are leaving the workforce, and Gen Z doesn’t have enough people to keep up. Fewer workers means higher inflation. AI might help offset some of the labor shortages, but that will be expensive and time-consuming. Throw in an anti-immigration administration, and you’ve got years of inflationary pressure baked into the US economy.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming from Colorado. And today we’re talking about the U.S. economy specifically looking at the situation of the American labor market. Now, we’ve recently had new data coming out of the Department of Labor. And normally we generate the United States generates about 300,000 new jobs, per month. According to the last chunks of data, in October, we actually lost 100,000. 

And in November, we only generated about 60, 65,000, reasons why we should take that data with a grain of salt. First of all, we had to shut down during this period, and so a lot of the surveys that were done, weren’t done or the ones that were done were done in an incomplete manner. So I don’t know if we can trust that data. 

Second. The Trump administration has gutted the Department of Labor, so it’s incapable of doing its job in the way that used to, because it said that the, data was being fudged to make Trump look bad. Well, with the new staff in place, the Trump administration looks bad. So you take that for what it is. 

Third, we’ve got I think, going on here where employers are trying to see if they can use early stage AI to replace workers. And while that is very much up for debate, and it’s very much in its early years, something I found really interesting is that the surge hiring that normally happens in October, in November to prepare for the holidays hasn’t happened this year. And normally when you think of AI, in the way that large language models do it, you’re talking about things that substitute for white collar labor. And usually the people who are being hired for Christmas are doing inventory in his blue collar labor. So we’re having some weird, weird crosscurrents that we just don’t know about yet. So that’s number three. 

Number four. More importantly, we might have to adjust our expectations, for demographic reasons. So the baby boomers, the largest generation we’ve ever had, at one point, there were over 75 million of them. And now three quarters of them have already retired. So the largest chunk of the labor force has left. And then the new generation coming in. The Zoomers are the smallest generation we’ve ever had. Well, if you exit the largest group and enter the smallest group, you’re going to have a quantitatively smaller labor force. In fact, we’re probably losing about a half a million to three quarters of a million of a people out of the labor force this year. And that number will keep going up in the next ten years as the Zoomers continue to enter the workforce, because they just get smaller and smaller. 

So that 300,000 kind of stake in the ground that we’ve become used to these last 60 years is probably not correct anymore. And it all adds up to an economy where we just have less labor to work with overall. And so if AI is able to increase productivity, this is actually great, because we’re certainly not going to have enough bodies to put in those positions. 

This is probably going to be a strongly inflationary environment for the next several years, regardless of what happens with policy. And at the moment, what is happening in policy is also strongly inflationary because of the anti-immigration sentiment that we have in the United States and most strongly in the white House itself. So if we have a shrinking labor pool and the Trump administration is also shrinking the labor pool further because of immigration, then our only option is to increase productivity. 

And the only way you can increase productivity is by adding new technology. But that takes capital, which is also in short supply because of what’s going on with the baby boomers taking their savings and moving into retirement. Bottom line inflation, inflation, inflation that’s cooked into the system regardless of whatever else goes right or goes wrong. First, and most notably in the labor market. 

Ukraine War Peace Talks

A mural of a ukraine flag with a peace sign in it

Ukraine and Russia peace talks are proceeding furiously, but going nowhere, mostly because the Trump administration is trying to make this a rush job and has neglected all the important details.

Steve Witkoff has been the lead on these negotiations, but with no foreign policy experience, we’re getting the kind of results you would expect. The pattern looks something like this: Witkoff meets with Ukraine or Russia, he’s force-fed propaganda, he regurgitates that back to the White House, a fantastic new deal (aka a one-sided propaganda piece) is written up, the other side rejects it, and the pattern repeats itself.

We’re seeing deals being drafted that completely ignore the redlines established by either side, so it’s quite clear that these peace talks aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all Peter Zeihan here coming from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about the status of the peace talks with Ukraine and the Russians to end the Ukraine war. We’ve we’ve had really two big problems with any meaningful negotiations so far. Number one, Donald Trump really wants a peace deal, but he really doesn’t care at all about the details. 

So whatever the peace deal of the moment is, it’s on his desk. He’s like, this is wonderful. This is the best deal ever. Let’s do this. And when countries push back, he screams at them and starts to threaten them. Until this point, the country that he’s been screaming at and threatening has usually been Ukraine. And that is because of the second problem, and that is the US chief negotiator, who’s a guy by the name of Steve Wyckoff, would cough, is a real estate mogul from New York, old buddies of Donald Trump. 

And he has said on a number of occasions in a number of venues that he knows nothing about negotiation and nothing about foreign affairs, and he’s proud of that. He has no intention to ever learn anything. So I and others have always thought that Wyckoff was just rabidly pro-Russian because he doesn’t meet with Ukraine. He’s never met with Zelensky, who’s the Ukrainian president. 

Just goes to Moscow, sits down, tilts his head back, and the Russians pour a few gallons of Russian propaganda into him. He comes back to the white House, vomits it forth. Trump says, oh, this is wonderful peace idea. Let’s do this. And when the Ukrainians refuse to agree to demands in from the Russians to basically withdraw their troops and shut down their army and never seek a defensive alliance, the Ukrainians say no. And then Trump goes off the handle. That’s basically been the pattern for this year to this point. 

What changed in the last week is that Steve Wyckoff met with Zelensky for the first time, and guess what happened? He tilted his head back, and Zelensky poured a few gallons of Ukrainian propaganda down his throat. Witcoff came to the white House and vomit it forward. All of a sudden we have a Ukrainian peace plan that ignores all of the Russian demands. Specifically, would allow for an article five style security guarantee with the United States. One of the things that the Russians have refused to even negotiate on is Ukraine ever joining NATO, because they don’t want the other countries, most notably the United States, to get involved in the conflict? 

Remember that for the Russians, it’s not just about Ukraine. It’s about pushing their Western periphery back to an area that they find more defensible, so that that periphery actually matches geography, so that they can use mountains and seas to defend themselves. That means not just conquering all of Ukraine, but also all of Finland and Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania and Moldova and big chunks of Poland and Romania as well. 

So anything that involves foreign troops, the Russians will generally reject. But Trump, having not done the homework, think that’s just means NATO. So the new plan by the Ukrainians is for a NATO style guarantee to not be with the alliance, but be with the United States and Germany and Poland and France and basically every NATO countries signed a bilateral deal instead. 

And Trump, this is the last deal in front of us. Like this is a wonderful idea. And so this is the peace plan. It is still a stupid peace plan. It’s just meets one side’s point as opposed to the other side’s point. What that means for me is I am now gone from thinking that would cause is just rabidly pro-Russian to realizing the word cost is just really fucking stupid and Trump can’t tell. 

So why would an alliance of the structure with Ukraine be as horrible of an idea as every plan that’s come forward to this point? That’s been from the Russian point of view? Well, remember, for the Russians, Ukraine is not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the story. And so if we are now directly involved in the third Ukraine war, because that was what the next one would be, then the Russians would use all the weapons systems that they have available, including their nukes and their intercontinental ballistic missiles, because all of a sudden they are in a multi theater war. 

And that means that this deal in its current form, pretty much guarantees in exchange, it’s going to sound horrible. But for the United States, the best outcome of these talks is something that fails and continues with NATO and the United States supporting Ukraine and helping them build up an independent defense capacity so they can stand up to the Russians on their own. 

And that means ongoing weapons transfers and ongoing assistance. The alternative is to leave the Ukrainians out to dry, in which case the Russians don’t stop at Ukraine and come right into NATO countries, or to put American troops on the ground to defend the Ukrainians against the next Russian assault, in which case we get that exchange. So this deal is just as bad as everything that has come before. 

What I do find really interesting is we actually have some talk on the specifics, not just in the white House in Congress, but because a bilateral security alliance requires Senate approval and ratification. And we’re already starting that process now, I don’t think that this will happen. I don’t think this should happen. But, you know, Steve, what comes next stop is in Moscow. 

So I’m sure he’s going to change his mind again and come up with a new plan that will go before Trump, and then he will change his mind again and we’ll get back to this cycle. But the real thing that has changed in just the last few days is now an understanding that the details don’t matter to this administration at all. 

And unless and until we get, at a minimum, a new chief negotiator for Ukraine, this is just the cycle that we’re in. A lot of screaming and no real change.