United States Archives - Page 3 of 24

US Navy Strikes Houthi Forces in Yemen

Things in the Red Sea have ramped up yet again. The Houthis, who are an Iranian-backed Shiite group in Yemen, launched a series of missile and drone attacks on international shipping. Early today, the United States conducted a retaliatory air assault on Houthi targets.

In response to an increase in assaults on commercial shipping and an anti-ship missile being launched toward US naval assets, the US targeted Houthi command and control systems, radar, and ammunition storage facilities. Only time will tell if the US is serious about getting involved in this region, and it will likely depend on Iran’s willingness to engage in discussion with the Biden Administration.

Everything about this region is complex (and I have very little desire to dive too deep), so we’ll leave it at “complex.” In all likelihood, we’ll see Iran push the Houthis away from a conflict with the US in favor of directing any assets toward their regional rival, Saudi Arabia.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Phoenix Airport today and talk about a part of the world that I really don’t care for at all. And that’s in Yemen. There’s been an insurgency going on in Yemen since, I don’t know, Paleolithic period, multiple sides. You’ve got a relatively secular ish government. You’ve got a Sunni militia that’s kind of an officially or semiofficial affiliated with Al Qaeda.

And then you’ve got a Shiite group called the Houthis that are wildly incompetent at most work and really can’t hold themselves together. There’s very little that’s worth fighting over that you have a little natural gas. But once this boiled up, I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago, everyone puzzlingly got out of that business. The water tables crashed. Most agricultural production isn’t even going to food.

It’s going to something like Qot, which is a mild narcotic. That’s kind of a very, very mild version of like cocaine and shrooms put together that most of the population is high on all the time. Really not a lot going on there that matters to anyone but the detailed depth you need to command in order to say anything.

Intelligence extreme. So it’s like that perfect mix of irrelevance and tedium that I just Treadwell avoid at all costs. Unfortunately, since the Gaza war got started, they’ve started to be cooking off missiles and drones at international shipping going through the Red Sea. Their position is on the eastern side of the bubble MANDEB, which is on the extreme southern southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

And they actually do have the ability to reach in there if they put their minds to it. Of course, they are incapable of making their own weapons. I mean, this is a place where sticks and stones are the highlight of the technology. So all the weapons are brought in from Iran. Who is specifically backing the Houthis in this multi-sided fight?

The Iranians like to do that because it’s on the far side of Saudi Arabia, who is the regional rival. And everyone’s while the Houthis are, let’s be honest here, every once while the Iranians use Houthi cover in order to launch some missiles and some drones into Saudi targets. For their part, the Saudis have not really taken the bait in the traditional sense.

I mean, yes, they have invaded, but really they’re just using everything in Yemen as target practice because they know there’s no way that they’ve got the military capacity to actually root out these groups. So they basically aim for the blue roof is what I like to call it, in anticipation of someday the Iranians actually driving down through Iraq and Kuwait to the Saudi oil fields.

Basically, the Saudis are preparing by getting their fighter pilots some target practice, which, you know, it’s not stupid, it’s just inhumane. Anyway, back in 2022, the Saudis and the Houthis signed a side that makes it sound so formal they agreed to a peace deal or ceasefire anyway. And since then, the Houthis with the Iranians have been stockpiling weapons in anticipation of the next outbreak of hostilities.

Well, and the aftermath of the October 17th assault on Israeli targets by Hamas, we now have this war in Gaza. And the Houthis are saying that they’re cooking off missiles and attacking shipping that is affiliated with Israel and by affiliated Israel. What they really mean is anything that happens to go by because they don’t really have a good way to identify anything.

So they’ve just been shooting whatever they see. Well, local time in the middle of the night on January 12, the United States launched a moderate sized air assault using some Tomahawks and some fighter bombers on who the targets saying that they were targeting a few command and control systems, a little bit of radar and mostly the ammo dumps and processing facilities where the Houthis launch these things from.

Now, this is a fairly big chunk of territory. This isn’t like the tiny little pipsqueak of territory that Gaza is. This is actually, you know, something almost size Colorado. I think I’ll get back to you on that one. So clearing out the Houthies is definitely not an option without a Iraq style invasion, and that is not in the cards.

The question, of course, is how serious is the Biden administration about this? We’ve seen 12% of global trade get disrupted by these drone and missile assaults. So they’d have to put their back into it if the United States really wanted to stop this. It’s not clear that that’s the goal. And in fact, I’m fairly certain it’s not. You see, there was a precipitating event earlier in the day before the strikes.

The amount of assaults on the commercial shipping have been incrementally increasing. But what was different about the 12th is that a ballistic anti-ship missile was launched to U.S. naval assets and within hours, the United States shot back. It’s not that the United States is overly concerned about shipping, despite the PR, but you shoot at a Navy vessel if you vessel will return fire.

So I’m sure the message is being delivered quietly to the Iranians right now is like, you know, you do what you feel you need to. Just know that if you target us again, this is going to be a lot more involved. And it’s not just going to be the Houthis that are getting shot back at. Remember that every drop of oil that Iran exports goes to the Strait of Hormuz and everyone likes to make an unknown about the possibility of Iran closing the strait.

But they actually need it more than most of the other producers in the region. Will that be enough? I mean, time will tell, but there’s reason to be at least partially optimistic because something similar happened back in 2016 when the Houthis targeted an American naval asset and a lot of their stuff got blown up within the next couple of days.

And there haven’t been threats against U.S. naval assets since until today. So there’s some capability here for this to be smoothed out, but ultimately comes down to whether or not the Iranians are willing to actually have a conversation with the Biden administration about anything. Now, the Iranians do have a stronger support relationship with the Houthis than they do with, say, Hamas.

Hamas is Sunni and Arab, whereas the Iranians are largely Persian and Shia. So the Iranians have always seen Hamas as completely disposable. They don’t really care about it. They’re happy with what’s going on in the Israel Hamas war in Gaza, but they’re not going to intervene in any meaningful way to protect something that they don’t even consider to be an asset.

Who these little bit different? They are Shia. And so there’s a little bit more camaraderie and like needling Israel, which is, you know, convenient and fun and good for PR in Iran and around the Arab world, maybe only in Saudi Arabia. Their primary regional foe is a much more strategically important thing. So there’s leverage on both sides here.

But ultimately, the Iranians would love to keep the Houthis focused on Saudi Arabia because that’s where the money is and that’s where the future conflict for the Iranians ultimately will be. And they would love for the United States to stick out of this. So they’ve been basically needling the United States and needling Israel because it’s good P.R. across the Middle East.

But I don’t think they’re really interested in bleeding for it, because their real fight requires every asset they have later on. So I would guess that we’re going to see things simmer down in Yemen and I can go back to ignoring it.

What Power Do the Independents Have Over Trump?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Breakdown of the Republican Coalition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s Disqualification: How We Got Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australia, After America

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

We’re heading down under today, and we’re not here to f*** spiders. The Australians are one of the few countries that will stay under the United States’ wing as the Order collapses, but they have a few things to figure out first.

The Aussies have grown awfully close economically to the Chinese over the past few decades, so they’ll need to find some different customers. I’m sure the U.S. will make the list. Australia will also have to find a way to rapidly move up the value-add chain in terms of processing capabilities and capacity.

There’s also an Outback-sized sub-prime real estate issue that will trigger a financial crisis when it finally cracks…especially if all of these issues boil up at the same time.

Regardless, the Australians have got in good with the Americans, and they’re set to thrive in the deglobalized world. And the US isn’t mad about it either; they’re getting a creative and capable ally with plenty of the stuff that will be in high demand in the coming years.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from above Ken Karl in Colorado today, we will do another session of the Post America series, specifically looking at all Australia. We’ve got four things going on with the Aussies as the world breaks down around it. Three are really a challenge and one is actually pretty impressive. So let’s start with the bad.

China trying to China is trying to. Trying to China. Australia is capable of a relatively two faced forward economic policy. They are tight, tight, tight allies with the United States. But at the same time they will ruthlessly exploit any economic opportunities that the American led security order has offered. And so all of the Western nations, Australia is absolutely the one that has gotten into bed the deepest with the Chinese economically.

Primarily as a raw commodities producer, whether it is bauxite or iron ore or natural gas, you name it, lithium. China has been far away. Their number one customer for most of these things for most of the last 40 years. And those numbers are only going up. And so when they have a spat with the Chinese, the Americans are like, you know, you’re our friend and we’re going to say nice things about you.

But, you know, when we said global economic order, what we we didn’t really mean for you to, like, go and just swallow everything that the Chinese put in your mouth. That’s going to be a problem moving forward, because a lot of the Chinese demand has never been economically viable. The Chinese have a hyper financialization system which basically prints money and confiscates bank deposits in order to fuel industrial development, even if it’s not something the Chinese are good at.

And something like that is fairly price insensitive and they will buy almost anything at any price if it furthers whatever the political goal is, which is usually to build infrastructure. An industrial plant in Australia has been arguably the single largest supplier to the Chinese this entire time. When that goes away and the Australians have to sell to more economically sane folks, it’s not like the market is going to collapse completely.

But this balls to the wall price insensitive expansion that they’ve seen in most of their spaces for the last few decades. That’s just not going to carry on. They will be able to replace the Chinese demand with demand elsewhere, especially as the U.S. industrialize is in the Southeast Asia. Kind of steps into some of those roles. But collectively, that will be nearly as big as what the Chinese have pulled from the Australian economy this whole time.

So that’s going to be a pretty harsh adjustment when it comes. The second problem is that the Australians never moved up the value added scale in the raw materials industry. They’ve always been a raw commodities provider, whether that has been the iron or they don’t produce steel or the lithium, they don’t produce batteries, the natural gas, they don’t produce chemicals, the wheat, they don’t produce flour.

And so basically the stuff is grown or pulled out of the earth and shipped off. And that’s the end of the story. And that industrial plant that the rest of the world has to build to replace China, some of that really needs to happen in Australia as well. And the time to start working on that was probably 1989.

They are so far behind. In fact, it’s only in the last year with the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States where the Australians have negotiated to kind of join the subsidies regime. So some American money will come into Australia to help build out the industrial plant for processing. But they should have been doing this in absolutely every product set that they produce decades ago.

And so when the processing capacity, which is concentrated in China goes offline, even if there is demand for the raw commodities, other place is going to have to build the processing capacity first. So that adjustment down in a post China environment is going to be a lot worse than it needs to be. The third problem is entirely homegrown.

You got to remember subprime. Well, the Australians had something that was much worse. The problem is they never fixed it. So you can say what you want about the American approach to subprime. We forced people who had made decisions whether they were banks or homeowners, to eat some of the losses in order to qualify for restitution funds from the Federal Government.

The Australians didn’t. They just guaranteed everyone’s loans. And so everything has just gotten deeper. It has festered for the last 15 years and arguably I think it’s conservatively, you could say that the subprime problem now is at least a factor of five in relative terms worse than what the United States went through. And so when that finally cracks.

And I would argue that a sharp d globalization shock or deep China ification would be more than enough to trigger a financial crisis in that sort of environment. They’re going to have something that’s at least a factor of five or worse than what the United States went through with subprime. And all three of these things, unfortunately, are probably going to hit them all at the same time.

So it’s not that Australia is looking at a recession, it’s that they’re looking at a depression that’s probably in the last a half a decade, and that’s going to be horrible. But let’s focus on the upside. This is the post-American series. This is what the world looks like when the United States steps back from maintaining sea lanes and gluts.

A lot of its alliances drop. Australia is not going to be dropped. Australia has always proven to be a creative and capable ally. They’ve formed international coalitions to unofficially achieve American policy. They were with us in Korea, they were with us in Vietnam. They were with us in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have always been among the first to belly up to the bar, realizing that the world that they live in and the security they have, the economy they have is only possible because of the strategic overwatch the United States has granted.

And that means Australia is also one of only very, very few countries who have ever gotten a free trade agreement with the United States. Not because we were sacrificing for security reasons. We granted them because they had been such a great friend for so long. And when we move into the post-American world, it’s not that the United States is going to do anything.

We are going to have some allies where the balance of commitment from us and the benefits of commitment from them make sense at the very, very, very, very top of that list is all struggling above Japan, above Singapore, above Canada, above Great Britain. Australia is first. And so no matter what shape the world takes as globalization ends, the Aussies know that we will have their backs because we know that they have ours.

And that means no matter how bad, the economic adjustment is going to be rooted in a free trade relationship. Now, with the United States. We know they will grow out of it because they have stuff that the world needs. They have stuff that we need. And I have no doubt that an ally as creative and capable as Australia is going to be able to apply that capability and that creativity to their own economic restructuring.

The question is, is whether they will start that process before the bottom falls out.

Argentina, After America

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

Next up in our ‘Post-America’ series is Argentina. I’m pretty optimistic about Argentina’s future…they just need to get out of their own way.

Between its abundant arable land, large shale industry and lack of any real strategic threats, Argentina is poised to be a significant regional power. Given Brazil’s dependency on international markets and trade, Argentina may look even better if the rest of the neighborhood has a shake-up.

Sure, Argentina has some hurdles to jump over. The mounting levels of debt will have to be sorted out(or, more likely, magically disappear with little to no consequence), and the political system will need to be revamped. Despite all of that, I’m still expecting Argentina to emerge as a major power in South America as we enter a deglobalized world.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from just below Deming Peak in the Eagle’s Nest Wilderness. Today, we’re going to look at another one of our post-American series, What Parts of the World are gonna get really interesting when the United States really takes a big step back? And today we’re talking talk about the southern cone of South America, specifically Argentina.

Now, for those of you have read this, United Nations, you know that I’m pretty bullish on Argentina’s future. Grows all the food that it needs. It’s got arable land without irrigation. It’s got a fairly sizable shale industry, third largest in the world, if you can believe that. And despite their own ideological hang ups, it’s broadly functional in that regard.

No one’s going to starve in Argentina. No one’s going to run out of food. And because they’re at the southern end of South America, they really don’t have any military threats to speak of. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s the Falklands Island crap, which is just imperialism and anti-imperialism offshore doesn’t really affect the math in Argentina at all.

Also, the Brits right now can’t do anything without the United States, you know. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah. As the United States pulls back, trade is going to be a lot harder to come by as the global demographic, especially in the rich world, advances, capital is going to become harder to come by. And for Argentina, this is just a normal Tuesday.

Now, a country that is near them, Brazil is one that is absolutely dependent upon international trade, absolutely dependent on international technology and especially capital. So I can absolutely see Brazil’s fortunes tanking in the next couple of decades, not because they’ve done necessarily anything wrong, but because the environment that has allowed them to flourish these last 30 years is gone.

I mean, think about what we’ve had. We’ve had bottomless supplies of global capital. We’ve had a price insensitive Chinese who will buy up any commodity that is available. And in that environment, high cost producers like Brazil can do really well. But that’s not the normal state of affairs. The normal state of affairs is capital is hard to come by.

And trade is so much circumspect in that environment. Argentina is very, very well set up for the future. The question is what happens in Argentina’s neighborhood now, as Brazil falters? There are going to be splits within the Brazilian nation with some provinces realizing that as long as they’re attached to the poorer provinces, they can’t function. They’re at a detriment.

And Brazil, unlike the United States or Argentina, is more of a confederal political system, where the provinces have, in many cases, more power than the national government in Brasilia, which is a long way away and way up north in the rainforest. So I can see a circumstance in the not too distant future where a number of Brazil’s southern, more temperate provinces, which are more economically viable, which have more stable population structures and better infrastructure, find ways to loosen the ties that bind to the rest of Brazil.

The question is, what is Argentina do in those circumstances? Does it see this as an expansion opportunity? Does it see this as an opportunity to build a series of buffer states? Honestly, it will be up to the Argentineans as to what goes here, because the Brazilians are not going to have the military or cultural power to fight back.

Now, no one in Argentina is thinking along these lines at the moment, but as the world changes around Argentina, these thoughts are going to come to the surface. This is going to be a conversation they’re going to have to have. Not today, not tomorrow, but probably in the 2030s. And if you want to bring up the Falklands again, there is no circumstance.

I can imagine in the 2013 and 2040s where the Brits are able to independently project power that far south. This is not me telling Buenos Aires just to buy your time and you’re going to be able to take it. But it does suggest that when the environment changes, it all will. I can’t believe I talked about Argentina without bringing up the debt issue.

Okay, so Argentina is a very highly indebted country, not because it doesn’t have income, but because it can’t do math. The country regularly takes out huge loans. That has very little intention of repaying. And oftentimes as soon as you get a government shift, then they go into default. They’ve done this like 14 times, I think, in the last century and a half, and they are probably gonna do it again in the next decade.

And no, I don’t think that this is going to overall change my view of the trajectory of the country. Because in a world where international law breaks down and international debts aren’t going to be worth very much unless you can get there with a gunboat to enforce them. And no one can really do that for Argentina because it’s too far away.

So again, I’m not saying that the Argentineans should just default on everything, but in the time they’re going to default on everything, what does that mean for the political situation? The dominant political strain in Argentina is something called Peron ism, which was built by a guy named Peron, and it basically combines the dumbest, most economically nonfunctional, most politically divisive aspects of socialism with a very sloppy version of fascism.

Basically, you get a leader who castigates anyone who doesn’t believe what he thinks at any given time as an enemy of the state and use the tools of power of the state to prosecute them, while at the same time grabbing money from wherever he can to slap it servers politically useful to him. Now, if this sounds familiar to those United States, I basically just describe Trumpism.

If Trumpism becomes the dominant ideology of the United States, we’re not going to turn to the Nazi Germany. The Trump aren’t nearly that organized. We’ll turn into Argentina. Now, that doesn’t mean that the country will die or anything, but it will get economically wrecked. The Argentineans have been going down this path now for about a century, and at the time that Peron did his thing, Argentine there wasn’t that much less well-off than the United States.

In fact, right after World War One, Argentina, by in per capita terms, was the fourth richest country in the world. They’re still there. They’re still in the upper end of the developing world, but they’re nowhere near the leading light anymore. So for those of you who can do math or read maps, look at Argentina a little bit. Look at their history a little bit.

Look at their economics a little bit. And that is a potential future for the United States. Not what I’m recommending, but we’ve seen exactly how this sort of political system corrodes rule of law makes risk taking and entrepreneurship dangerous, and overall leads to instability politically and economically. It’s not a good mix, but you have to view things in their neighborhood.

So in the case of Argentina, even if they continue down this path and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t, it’s still in a better position than Brazil and in the future that we’re going to. It’s all about what you look like in your neighborhood. Okay. That’s it for real this time. But.

India, After America

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

Countries across the globe have all benefited from the global order, but what happens when it comes crashing down? Thankfully for India, they are one of the few countries that will avoid much of the suffering.

India gets their energy from the nearby Persian Gulf (so no energy crisis for them), Indian agriculture is largely self-sufficient, and India isn’t overly dependent on trade…so what does this seemingly bright Indian future look like?

India (along with the rest of the developing world) has been overrun by Chinese manufacturing, but with China collapsing, the Indians will have to reclaim their manufacturing industry. Thanks to India’s widely differentiated labor market, this should make for a reasonably smooth transition. In all likelihood, India will become a manufacturing world power, even if all it does is supply its domestic market.

If you look at the attached graphic, you’ll notice India has a pure demographic pyramid at the top and then, at age 35, a sheer drop-off. This is a result of industrialization, but it does mean they’re having a period of hypercharged economic growth. The question we need to ask is, when does their luck run out?

India is a pocket power, meaning they don’t have a ton of great “expansion” options, and their geography will limit economic and strategic expansion. However, the geography that keeps India in place also helps to keep others out.

For that reason, India is very pro-India…meaning they are only looking out for number one and are willing to go out and take something if they need to. Luckily for the Indians, there won’t be many people who could stop them, either. Luckily for everyone else, we’re not to that point quite yet…

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Turkey, After America

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

Today’s country shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Sure, Turkey has been relatively silent over the past 70 years, but as American guardianship of the global seas declines, Turkey will reemerge as a dominant power.

Much of Turkey’s significance stems from its very, very fortunate geography; it controls the Turkish Straits and several other key waterways. This means that if anyone wants to move anything in this region, guess who they have to work with – Bingo – Turkey.

That’s the driving factor here, but it leaves Turkey with some big decisions. Should it partner with Ukraine against Russia or expand its influence in the Caucasus? Should it try to dominate the Aegean or displace German power in the Balkans? Should it absorb Mesopotamia and become the determining power of the Persian Gulf or make a bid for control of the Eastern Mediterranean? Given Turkey’s limited power to pursue all options simultaneously, it has some hefty strategic decisions to make that will shape its future.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado today. We’re doing the next in the Post American series and we are going to focus on Turkey. Now, the Turks have been a major power in the world going back to the date that they basically split off from the Mongol hordes back in the 1200s and eventually settled in the territory that we now know is Istanbul.

Well, subtle, wrong word conquered. Since then, they’ve been an indelible part of Middle Eastern and European politics. And the reason that I would say a lot of us don’t think of the Turks in that way is because they have been taking a little bit of a break from history. Their defeat at the end of World War One was so dramatic and shattered their political and economic orders that they basically pulled the welcome mat in and kind of fell in upon themselves.

For most of the last century, and it’s only with the rise of the current President Erdogan in recent decades that they’ve started to emerge and they’re kind of relearning the world around them and discovering is a lot messier than they remember. Most of the problems that you see in the Southern Balkans or the Levant in Mesopotamia can in some way be linked back to the disintegration of the sublime port in Istanbul from a century ago.

It wasn’t a pretty imperial collapse, and the region still shows the scars. Anyway, the Turks have been coming back into their own and they’re finding out that they have to make a lot of decisions. So one of the many, many, many, many, many reasons why the Turks are so important is the land that they occupy. Istanbul sits on the Golden Horn and it sits on the Turkish straits, which are the only source of water access between the Mediterranean.

Beyond that, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. And on the other side, the Black Sea. And through a series of navigable rivers that include the Dawn, the Dnieper in the eastern deep into the Ukraine and even into the the Russian interior, There’s a there’s a canal now that links the dawn to the Volga. So that goes all the way to Moscow.

And that means that by water, the Istanbul area has always been a linkage point. Then there’s, of course, by land, because if you go east into Anatolia, you’ll eventually hit Persia and beyond that, India and China. Or you can go to the Northwest through the Balkans and you get right up into Europe. Danube goes that way, too. So in any world where global trade is not a thing for whatever reason.

Istanbul is arguably the richest and most important city, economically, strategically on the planet. But that’s not where we’ve been living for the last 70 years when the Americans created the global order. The Turks had this great geography, but all of a sudden the Americans made it not matter because we made the global seas safe for everyone. And so all you had to do was get to a body of water and go anywhere, which is something that you could not do in the pre globalized era, because anyone who had a Navy would basically jealously guard their own commerce and shoot at everybody else’s.

So we had this flip in how commerce works, and the Turks went from having the best geography in the world to arguably among the worst. And so they disappeared. Well, that’s ending. The Americans are bit by bit removing their guardianship from the waterways, and the Turks are discovering that they’re becoming incrementally more important. They’re also discovering, as they re expand their influence back into all their old imperial territories, that a lot of these zones have developed opinions of their own about how things should run, but with very, very few exceptions.

The people who are developing those opinions aren’t particularly competent, and they’re certainly not very powerful. There is there’s not a country that is within arm’s reach of Turkey, with the possible exception of Iran, where they could stand up to the Iranians in any sort of meaningful fight economically, politically or militarily. And as long as that is the case, the Turks have this wonderful buffet of options in front of them.

But while the Turks here can go in any direction, they lack the power to go in, all of them at the same time. They’re going to have to do something that no one likes to do. They’re going to have to make some choices. So they just kind to go around the clock here and give you an idea of what’s in front of them.

In no particular order here, I’m just kind of picking a direction, going north into Ukraine. They’ve been there before. And by controlling the miles of the Dnieper in the East River, they were able to keep the Russian Empire at bay for a good century. They were also able to use their naval forces back in Istanbul. And any time the rivers would thaw, they’d sail up, they’d smash anything the Russians tried to build, and then they’d come back and, you know, be fine for the winter.

The Russians have a naval problem that they can’t really focus on any one particular direction. And so the Turks were kind enough to hit him with a hammer every time. So with the Ukraine, we’re going the Turks, while they’ve been politically on the fence and economically on the fence, strategically, they are cheering on the Ukrainians day by day and providing them with all the drones they can possibly use in order to fight the Russians.

Because the Turks know that with the exception of Ukraine, obviously, that if Ukraine wins this war, the Turks are the natural and largest beneficiary of a Russian defeat and disintegration. Working from that same theory. You go to the northeast, you hit the Caucasus, which is a place where empires often go to die. The Turks know this. Their empire kind of died there, too.

But that doesn’t mean the urge on opportunities, especially in the industrial age. You’ve got Azerbaijan, which is one of the world’s oil producers, kicks out about a million barrels a day, which flows through the Caucasus region and ultimately ends up in Turkey one way or another. There’s either a pipeline that crosses the land into Turkey to the super port of Jihan in the Mediterranean, or there is naval stuff that comes out of the Black Sea, which ultimately has to flow through Istanbul.

So no matter who wins in this area, it’s riches are going to be tapped. Turkey has to be a part of that conversation, which of course, begs the question whether the Turks will expand in this direction. There is one of the three Caucasus nations, Azerbaijan, who are ethnically Turkic and have as a rule, been allied with the Turks on and off for all of their independent period.

Since they emerged from the detritus of the Soviet Union. All of late in 2023. The Armenian military was basically destroyed. The Azerbaijanis conquered some territory that they lost to the Armenians 20, 25 years earlier and are now on the warpath. And the very future of the Armenian state is in question. And there’s really no one who could step in to broker a deal except Turkey.

So this is, again, a very viable option. But let’s say you think that the Turks should take a little bit more bare knuckled approach. Well, I probably won’t be in the Caucasus. That would be in Iran. Go straight east. You hit what the Iranians call Iranian Azerbaijan, similar ethnic group to what is in Azerbaijan itself. The Iranians have always been nervous about an independent Azerbaijan on their doorstep because they’re actually more Azeris in Iran proper.

Well, they are again ethnic kin to Turkey. And if Turkey wanted to I’m not saying they’re going to, but if they wanted to, you could have a serious slam dunk fest where we would put the Turkish military, which is one of the best in the world, against the Iranian military, which is really just a bunch of barely trained infantry.

I have no doubt who would win that conflict in the long run. But the key word there is long run because this is a mountainous zone and every mountain crust is a new battlement. And so for the Turks to do that would be a serious commitment. They could probably do very little else. You go to the southeast, you’re hitting Mesopotamia and where the Kurds live, which are a minority that exists on both sides of the border.

Again, in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria could soon meet those anymore. And again, oil and gas. Oil and gas. Oil and gas, a little bit of wheat, also access to the Persian Gulf, which would make the Turks a player in the world’s largest free energy market. In a time when global energy is no longer being protected by the Americans.

That would allow them to become a broker in any number of ways. They go straight south. They hit the Levant, which is where the Israelis are now, the Israelis and the Turks. During the first half of the Cold War going up to about 1979, were tight allies with the Iranians. And then when Iran, when its own way, they remained allies until Erdogan came on the scene.

And Erdogan doesn’t much care for the Israelis. It’s a very mutual feeling because everyone is drawing a page from Turkish history, not only who the Ottoman Turks, the economic and political military superpower of the region. They were also the religious leaders. And Islam itself was based in Istanbul for a while. Well, they see the idea of Jews primarily of Western European descent from their point of view, oppressing Palestinians who are Arabs and Muslim as a bit of a problem.

And so there is a possibility here of a fight. But to have a fight, the Turks would have to invade all of Syria, Lebanon first. God knows nobody wants that mess. So I think it’s more likely they’re going to glare each other, even though the smarter play would be to cooperate. Because if you can have the Turks and the Israelis more or less on the same page, they can easily keep other powers out of the region while at the same time projecting power themselves into Egypt to control the Suez Canal, which is, you know, many money, money, money, money.

All right. Continuing on clockwise now, looking to the southwest, the eastern Mediterranean, specifically Cyprus in Greece. Now, the economist in me is like there’s nothing there to be had. Don’t go that way. But unfortunately, the Aegean Sea is the first stop past Istanbul to the wider world if you’re using that vector. And so there needs to be some sort of rapprochement or understanding or occupation of these lands by the Turks in order to have access to the wider world.

Unfortunately, the Greeks and the Turks do not get along, and the Turks and the Cypriots hate each other so much. Also getting involved in these places means dealing with a mountainous country with a lot of naval frontage and a sea environment where the Turks are always going to be involved somewhere else. So it would make it easier for another naval power of the French to come in and muck things up seriously.

And then finally, the last direction is to the northwest, into the Southern Balkans, specifically the southeastern Balkans, Romania and Bulgaria, because here you’ve got the lowlands of the Danube system which punch up into northern Europe and you’ve got two of the more sophisticated ethnicities of all the countries that border Turkey. And so if you’re looking for general economic activity, energy reserves, food supplies, some solid choices.

In addition, those two countries are blocked off from the rest of the Europe by the Carpathian of the Balkan Mountains, making it a little easier to defend and a little bit more naturally in the Turkish sphere of influence. So those are the options. Turks can’t can’t even pretend to do them all, maybe two. Now, the the strategic genius in me would say that the two to choose are pretty straightforward.

You would, number one, want to go for the Balkan vector because the Bulgarians and the Romanians have warm to cool relationships with the Turks already, and all three of them see each other as relatively reliable economic and security partners. The bad blood that dates back to the late Ottoman period is for the most part behind them, and especially when it comes to the Romanians and the Bulgarians, they realize that there aren’t a lot of other options.

If the United States loses interest in this part of the world writ large, all they’ve got left are the Russians and that experience was as pleasant for the Romanians and the Bulgarians as the Cold War as it was for everybody else. The second route that I would go to is I’d find the deal a way to make a deal with the Israelis, because that allows you to do an end run to a certain degree around Greece, allows you block off Suez into your sphere, makes it more difficult for anyone else, whether it’s Britain, France or whoever else, to punch through from the western Mediterranean into the eastern.

But history has a way of doing things that don’t sound particularly wise from an economic point of view. And we’ve all played risk and we all know it can go any number of directions. So this is the challenge in front of them. It’s an embarrassing bit of opportunities and a lot of strength, but not enough strength to seize the day on every single possibility.

History can be hard and history forces us to be choosy, and in that the Turks are no exception whatsoever.

Northern Africa, After America

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

For our next installment in the ‘Post-American’ series, we’re looking at Northern Africa. This region only has a few countries that will turn out alright and a lot that will hurt for some time.

So, who’s topping the leaderboard? Countries like Morocco and Tunisia have a leg up thanks to their -somewhat- functional economies. On the flipside, countries like Algeria, Libya, and Egypt have an uphill battle ahead of them.

This region will be far from stagnant between military interventions, dependency on extra-regional powers, and a looming famine. But we’re only scratching the surface of this continent, so we’ll dive into Sub-Saharan Africa later in the series.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, We’re going to do the most recent installment of our post-American series. We’re going to start talking about Africa, specifically North Africa. Now, so remember, from grade school, Africa is not just one place. Big continent larger than South America or Europe or Australia. Obviously gives North America a run for its size in every way that matters.

But it is split by the Sahara. So the population of North Africa has almost nothing to do with the population of sub-Saharan Africa. You’ve got a relatively thin coastal strip going from Morocco in the northwest into Algeria, and then it just stops. The Libyan part of North Africa is pretty dry. So once you get past Tunisia, there’s a little nub of territory by the Gulf of Sidra.

But the Gulf of Sidra and areas east are completely barren. In most places, the coastal strip where you get a little bit of rain is less than ten miles. And then, of course, eventually you get on the other side of the desert and you get to Egypt, which has a very different hydrological and cultural and economic history. So women work from west and east.

The key thing to remember about all of these areas is they’re utterly incapable of projecting power. Most of these zones have never had trees, so they don’t have a maritime tradition that’s worthy of the name. And industrialization came very late to them after independence, after World War Two, for the most part. And even then, it’s been very uneven because there aren’t a lot of resources to generate income.

And so there’s not an opportunity to generate a lot of education. And since the areas are so dry, the population has never been very substantial. So let’s start from Morocco. It’s probably the most functional of the North African states because it does rain a little bit more there. The Atlas Mountains do generate a little bit more impulse for agriculture and even industry.

And so in terms of most of the measures that most people care about it in Tunisia, which has a somewhat similar setup, have always been the most advanced countries, But it’s not enough to look after their own needs. Like a lot of developing countries in the post-World War Two era, these countries were able to develop certain sorts of income from, say, phosphate mining in the case of Morocco and a little bit of oil in the case of Tunisia.

And they use that to provide services for their population and to most importantly, buy food. So the carrying capacity of these lands is arguably higher than what is capable. And if something happens to irrational trade, famine is kind of be one of the major concerns moving forward. What Tunisia and Morocco do have going for them, though, is a much more sophisticated population with higher educational levels and a better relationship with outside powers.

So everyone in North Africa lacks the capacity to look after their own needs. All of them need to partner with someone. But these are two countries that have pretty good relations with someone. So in the case of Morocco, there’s a free trade agreement with the United States. In the case of Tunisia, they have pretty good relations with most of the Europeans and have been among the more liberal politically countries of the Middle East.

Now, liberal not like Democrat versus Republican, liberal like women can show their faces. People can get an education. The government doesn’t shoot everyone that they disagree with. And so both of these countries are going to be able to maintain kind of a know what’s not semi-independent. That’s not it. But their definition of sovereignty or their own issues. There aren’t a lot of resources to go after and they have a more capable population.

So it argues for negotiations in their future about issues of security and trade as opposed to anything that’s more neo colonial Algeria. Not so much. Algeria’s got oil and it lacks the technical capacity to keep its oil fields operational, much less expand them. Now, the Algerians, if they were given the choice, would only deal with the United States.

That’s because they actually have a colonial master that’s real close and that is the French. Relations between the French and Algerians have never been good. The French tried to hang on to Algeria during the colonialization process of the 20th century, to the point that the United States and the United Kingdom felt it was necessary to write into the NATO’s charter that things like the security guarantees of NATO’s Article five did not apply to Algeria.

And so when the Algerians fought for their independence, it was a brutal, bloody war that lasted years. Now, the French do have the technical expertise. It’s necessary to maintain the Algerian oil fields. But the Algerians have said repeatedly that they would rather not produce oil at all and descend into poverty and famine and let the French back in.

And unless and it’s unlikely the Americans are willing to step in to mediate this or manage Algerian oil, odds are we’re going to have some sort of reprise of the conflict between the Algerians on the French. And that is going to get ugly. There’s no way around that. The future of Algeria will be determined by how willing Algiers and Paris are to have a conversation as opposed to shoot at one another.

And that is very much to be determined. Libya, on a good day, is a failed state. The only way that Libya ever was able to achieve anything is under the rules of globalization and the globalized order where countries were not allowed to invade one another. But Libya is absolutely incapable of looking after itself. It’s arguably one of the more incompetent oil producers out there.

And since you have a very thirsty continent just to the north of it, there will be a military invasion in some form of what is left of the Libyan state with the Italians being the most likely power and maybe the French in second place, although they might cooperate on this. The future for Southwest Europe is one where France is calling most of the shots, including in Rome.

And so I can see sort of a condominium in Libya there. But there is no room whatsoever in the future for an independent Libya period. And that leaves us with Egypt, which is a very, very special case. The Egyptians have been around for a few millennia, arguably the oldest ethnicity in the world. The problem here is that they industrialize to a degree.

And so they were able to produce cash crops like cotton or citrus, that massive Lee earn massively more money on international markets than wheat. And they then used that money to buy wheat. Now, this kept the population relative quiescent because bread is heavily, heavily, heavily subsidized. But it means that the population is probably now double with the carrying capacity of the Nile Valley would be if they switched everything back to wheat today.

So we are looking at a mass famine event of biblical proportions later this century in Egypt’s future. The only question is how bad and how soon. I’ll give you an idea of how it could get really bad really quickly. The number one source of wheat that they import is Ukraine, and that’s gone. The number two source is Russia, and that’s on borrowed time.

There is no capacity for the world to ship enough emergency wheat supplies in to save the tens of millions of people who are going to starve to death. And that assumes nothing worse goes wrong. Remember, every country in this world, Project Power, can barely look after themselves. And there’s a big shakeup coming to the eastern Mediterranean. And it all depends upon what the Turks do.

The Turks have to decide what they want to focus on. And from the Egyptian point of view, they would dream of the Turks focusing to the southwest and on Egypt and Suez and the valley, because if that happens, then the Turks have a vested interest of getting food into Egypt in collaboration to a certain degree with Israel. But for that to happen, the Turks and the Israelis have to get along.

And so the Egyptians best case scenario is that the Turks agree to work with the Israelis, even though they don’t much care for Zionism and then focus a lot of aid money on Egypt to keep it alive. And that is a wish built on a wish, and it might well work out. But if it doesn’t, we’re looking at half the Egyptian population being in food danger.

And that’s before you consider something like climate change. If we get a really mild sea level rise over the next few decades, the entire Nile Delta, where half the population lives, is looking at getting, if not drowned, salt inundated, which will crush the ability of Egypt to grow food for its own people. So no matter which scenario you look at, Egypt’s time is ending.

It’s not that anyone’s going to take them over or erase the ethnicity, but the ability of Egypt to function as a state with its current population, it’s almost laughably unlikely. And the only question is how does that story end? But the only good news I have is that there’s probably not going to be a mass migration event because there’s a book in the Bible about how hard it is to get out of Egypt.

Physical infrastructure linking the valley to the rest of the world is almost nonexistent. And that means Egypt was going to suffer and maybe even die more or less in silence.

Israel, After America

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

We’re diving a little deeper into Israel for the next video in our ‘Post-American’ series. We’ll discuss their transition into a world without the US around and what domestic and international challenges they might face.

Israel’s major domestic problem stems from the social support network offered to a chunk of their population; instead of working or serving in the military, they study the Torah and pop out kids. And as this group grows in size, it will drag the economy further down and limit the power that a future Israel ‘could’ have obtained. (The rising political power of this less-than-engaged portion of the Israeli population is a big piece of how Israel was so surprised by the Hamas assault in October 2023.)

Israel’s international problems are no cakewalk either. As the US pulls out, Israel must beef up their security or find another guarantor. The most viable candidates are Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The Turks could be a bit of a wild card, but the Saudis are already tightening relations. These new partnerships are a top priority as tensions rise between Iran and Israel.

As all this unfolds, the fight over the Persian Gulf is brewing in the background. The stage is set for this region of the world to get quite chaotic. The partnerships Israel is curating could prove critical in determining which of the major regional powers will emerge on top.

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

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

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

And then there’s you.

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

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