United States Archives - Page 6 of 28

Why the Middle East Is So Aggravating (yet so difficult to leave)

The Middle East has been a thorn in the side for the US since day one, so why haven’t the Americans just abandoned ship? To understand why the US is still involved in the Middle East (and openly facing these potshot-esqe attacks), we need to breakdown this region…

The reason this is top of mind is the recent attacks on a US base in Syria carried out by Iranian-backed militants. Before I dive into these specific attacks, let’s look back at this region’s geopolitical history.

There’s a complicated history of trade routes and European colonization, but things got spicy when oil was discovered and geopolitical tensions flared up. This led to a lack of what I would call value-add governments, a spamming of militant groups, and eventually, post 9/11 involvement by the US.

So, the US stepped into a political and social nightmare and thought they could throw a bandage on it and be done; clearly that didn’t work. Fast forward to the present and the US is still involved in the region, clinging onto the ever-so-slight semblance of peace and order that’s been established…until now.

Despite years of trying to get to the bottom of this, the question remains – is continued U.S. presence necessary to prevent further instability or would withdrawal empower regional players to address security concerns independently?

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 just taking a walk after this guy dumped on us. The big news today, it’s February the fifth, is that overnight local time. Iranian backed militants in Syria attacked another U.S. base. It’s the first significant attack since those three American soldiers were killed early part of last week. And the United States launched a bunch of retaliatory strikes against Iranian backed militias throughout the region.

Anyway, this is the first significant action by them since. And again, it looks like a drone got through and hit the barracks again. This time it wasn’t American servicepeople who were killed, but a half a dozen Kurds that U.S. Special Forces were training. Let me explain how we got into the Middle East and why it’s difficult to get out.

And then we’ll put this into context. So I’m going back roughly very roughly a thousand years. The Middle East has not been a place that anyone wanted to be. It was on the way somewhere. So you had your more advanced somewhat very loosely using this term technocratic societies with little higher value add in their economic systems in the West.

And then you had East Asia and to a lesser degree, Southeast Asia and South Asia that produced goods that you could not find in the West, things like spices and porcelains and silks. And so the trick was to figure out how you could link these two economic systems together. Despite the vast distances involved, and from roughly 1000 to roughly 1500 A.D., the solution was coastal vessels, camels, caravans.

The problem with all of those things is you had to go through any number of intermediaries, especially for the land routes. And since the Sea Rats weren’t safe, most people stuck with the land routes. This meant that the folks who lived in between in the middle to the east of the Western nations or go the name found themselves having to pay massive markups because you’d send your go east and you’d bring the cargo west.

And every few miles or a few dozen miles, there’d be another middleman who would take the cut. And so the cost of these products didn’t double or triple or quadruple, but typically went up in cost by a factor of a thousand or so. And so what became what were not necessarily everyday goods, but not exactly considered exotic goods out east became the the cream of the luxury goods in the West.

And so the trick was to how do you how do you avoid those markups? The solution was set upon by the Spanish and the Portuguese, who developed the technologies to sail farther from the sea excuse me, far from the shore with old coastal vessels. If you happen to anchor, which you had to do every night within sight of land, there is a reasonable chance that somebody who lived in the neighborhood was just going to come and take your ship and kill your people and take all your stuff.

So that’s one of the reasons why they tend to prefer the land routes. But with the Portuguese and the Spanish developing deep water navigation, they were able to do an end run around that entire thing, interface directly with the East. And so from roughly 1500 until roughly 1900, the Middle East just didn’t matter. It became a complete backwater and eventually the Western countries industrialize.

And when they came back to the Middle East, to an area that had not industrialized, you know, you bring a knife to a gunfight enough times and the locals pay attention. And so you basically had the Brits, the French and the rest divvy up the entire region into mandates and colonies. Now, why was the West able to pull that off when the Middle East just kind of stayed at the same technological level?

And to be perfectly blunt, the answer is rainfall throughout the Western countries. In Europe, it rains. Rain means that you can grow crops in any number of areas. And if that gives people an interest in pursuing their own economic destinies. Also, you had winter in most of those areas. So in the off season, farmers could be working on something else.

They weren’t exactly getting law degrees. But the point is the overall skill level of the population steadily creeped up. And when you’ve got a lot of people who are invested in stability in the system, even if it’s not a democracy, you get a degree of political stability, economic advancement, technological acumen that you just don’t get in the Middle East and the Middle East.

Very few places have rain where you do have water. It’s in a relatively narrow band either right on the coast or along a river that makes it very, very easy for a political authority to rise and dominate that specific geography. And in doing so, basically you reduce the entire population to slave status. That does not give people a lot of interest in pursuing stability for the system makes revolutionaries very popular.

But it also means that the power of the state is just almost total, making it very, very difficult for anyone to make something of themselves. So you will get centers of learning throughout the Middle East who did absolutely preserve the Western knowledge during the Dark Ages, but they never applied it themselves. They never disseminated it with her in their own cultures.

They were basically just libraries maintained by monks. Oversimplification. 100 years of history. I recognize that. But you can’t deny the economic trajectory of the Middle East versus the West. And then once the West cracked the code on industrial technologies and they started having gunpowder and cannon and the Middle East was left behind, there is no contest at all.

So now today, the economies of the Middle East matter more to the world today than they have for most of the last half millennia, largely because of oil, because there is an asset those industrial economies need in order to function. Now, this isn’t so much an American problem directly because North America is self-sufficient and not even self-sufficient in oil is a significant exporter of oil.

And if the Middle East were to vanish tomorrow, we’d have some adjustments on things like crude quality. But within a couple of years would be totally fine. However, the Europeans significantly less so specifically since the Russian crude is no longer part of their equation. Parker Now, where does that bring us? Well, it means that anyone who goes in the Middle East after about 1950 is faced in a very different environment from what was faced from 1008 to 1500 when it was just a place you had to push through or from 1500 until roughly 1950 when the West was industrialized.

But the Middle East wasn’t. Now, the Middle East is, and no one’s going to say that a group like ISIS in Syria is like the pinnacle of human technology, but it’s really easy for them to get explosives and AK 40 sevens. So it’s no longer a contest like we saw from 1919 50 between an industrialized Western imperial system and a completely non industrialized, almost tribal Middle Eastern system.

You’ve got a different makeup now. Now, the governing systems of the Middle East themselves are also in play and very much in flux, because before 1950, you basically had a series of what could be best called Fortress Political Systems, where by dint of geography, you know, maybe they had an oasis like Damascus, maybe they were surrounded by desert like Egypt, maybe they were a mountain fastness like Iran.

It’s a little difficult to get in and out. And some of these areas are a lot more difficult to conquer than others are around really being at the top of that list. But you introduce industrial technologies to this area and the post-colonial post-World War two environment, and all of a sudden they’re not just drilling for oil. They’re building roads.

They’re buying military hardware. And it makes for a very different mix. You get this incredibly brittle, top down, concentrated political system that is absolutely in hate bubble of providing the people with the level of technological progress that is possible elsewhere in the world, because there’s very little to work from aside from cash from oil. And you apply that in a world where society is weak as well.

And the result you get lots and lots and lots and lots of militant groups. And if you want to back one versus the other or one versus government, that’s fine. But even if you win and the militant group overthrows the government, well then what you’ve taken what little order exists in an area and it’s turned into chaos. You get a complete societal breakdown, as we’ve seen in places like Egypt and Iraq and Syria in recent years.

So enter the United States in the aftermath of the 911 attacks. The Bush administration felt that the best way to fight al-Qaida was to make sure that the countries that allowed okay to function would go after it. So after the Afghan operation, we discovered that al-Qaida scattered to the winds, and we found out that a lot of the recruits were coming from Syria because that was how the Syrians got rid of their own dissidents.

A lot of the troops, Taliban troops that were in Afghanistan fled through Iran to parts unknown because the Iranians were like, Well, we hate these guys, but we don’t want to deal with them, especially since they don’t like the Americans very much and then the Saudis necessarily the government itself. But a lot of elements within Saudi Arabia were part of the ideological and financial underpinning that made Al Qaida possible.

How do I know that? Because we allied with them back in the eighties to form the Mujahideen, which eventually became the Taliban. Anyway, so the U.S. is looking at this region, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq 12th partner. And any of them wouldn’t be fun conquering all three at the same time to get after a militant group just doesn’t seem like the right task.

And so the solution that was struck upon was to knock over Iraq and occupy it with armored tank brigades, which is not the way you pacify a population. You want ground infantry for that. The idea is Tehran and Damascus and Riyadh. None of them thought the U.S. was going to do this. And so when it did it with tanks and left the tanks there, they’re like, shit, There’s nothing to stop the United States from turning on us.

And while Iran was, to a degree protected by its mountains, they had a little bit more confidence would be able to put up a good fight. The other two had no such confidence and they knew that if the United States decided to come for them that their regimes were done because there was no civil support, there was no technical competence, there was no cohesion.

Well, it worked. And those three, three countries went after al-Qaida for us and are the primary reasons The strategy is the primary reason why Al Qaida is, for all intents and purposes, no more problem is that we didn’t declare victory and went home. We tried to make Iraq look like Wisconsin with the results that you can imagine. Because, again, there’s nothing to build from in terms of society.

We overthrew what stable order there was and replace it with nothing. Now, fast forward to today. The Bush administration felt they had no choice but to go in. And, you know, we can debate whether it worked out well or not. First phase of the plan I think worked. Second phase, Obama changed nothing. Despite his rhetoric, Trump said he pulled out but left troops in places like Syria to fight ISIS because no one no one in the US political system wants to be blamed for being the guy who allowed that militant group to come back.

But here’s the problem. The countries in these areas are never going to have the foundation that’s necessary to form a country in the way that Americans or Westerners in general or even Asians see it. And so if your goal is to prevent the creation or the operation of the resurgence, the specific type of militancy, you will be there forever.

And that’s one of the reasons why we call them the Forever Wars, because we found ourselves going to war with a military tactic as opposed to any specific group. And while most of our troops are out of the region now, what happened earlier today in Syria is the best that we can hope for. Unless the strategy changes, we are never going to be able to turn these countries into something that we would normally recognize as a peer or is even someone in the same category as the nation states that we have in most of the rest of the world?

That’s not how these areas work. They never have. They don’t have the economic geography to try. And so we’re left with a fun little discussion. We have to have option A is stick it out forever, do what most of our forces have been doing in the region since the operation was slimmed down under Trump and hunker in your bases and watch and if something like oasis bubbles up again hit it with a hammer.

Go back to your bases and watch some more. And if you do that, you’ll be there forever. And while you’re there forever, other militant groups who have their own ideas of who should be in charge will take potshots at you. And that’s what we’ve been seen with the Iranians being the instigators. This is the new normal. This is the old normal.

This is just what the region look what’s option to leave from a casualty point of view. It’s easy. We’re never going to make this area look like something that we want. Danger if you leave. Is that a group that you specifically don’t like is going to boil up? Now, let me put that into context. Part of the reason that we’re still there is we find the tactics of ISIS beyond repute.

And we’ve seen that replicated in Hamas in the beginning of the Gaza war. We’re not going to be able to defeat a tactic. But the fear is, is if we leave, more of these groups will boil up in a shorter period of time and eventually start not just attacking the locals, but our interests in the region as well.

The problem with that theory is that it assumes that there’s something better that can happen if we stick around. Something to keep in mind, this is an area, a fortress cities. And historically speaking, when you don’t have an external power like the United States in those fortress cities, start to enforce their own writ on the area. Now, we have enabled Baghdad to recover from the Saddam and the occupation areas, and it’s doing a pretty good job of holding its own.

What we’re doing against groups like ISIS is basically taking some of the unknowns out of the equation for the other two major powers in this region, which are Damascus, Syria and Turkey. If the United States were to vanish overnight, they would have to deal with these unknowns themselves and we would have a much more aggressive effort from both countries to deal with groups like like ISIS.

That is more normal. And so we’re actually in this weird situation where U.S. forces that are remaining in the region, even if they’re just staying in their camps, are actually have become the single greatest reason why the government in Damascus still exists, because under normal circumstances, other regional powers would have moved in and smashed these groups that were patrolling out of existence.

And that means the Turks get more involved. That means the Syrians get more involved, and that means the Israelis get more involved. And in that sort of contest with Mesopotamia kind of acting as an anvil, we probably see the end of the Syrian government within five years. Of course, it would be bloody and horrible because this is a region that can barely grow food itself and it uses a lot of those energy imports or exports to buy food that it imports.

So the capacity here for an outright civilizational collapse is very, very real and agreed. The presence of U.S. forces is one of the few things holding the darkness at bay. Now, whether that is considered an American national interest or not, talk amongst yourselves.

East Asia, After America

Today, we’re looking at another region that the US will continue to keep tabs on – East Asia. This is one of those regions that will be plenty exciting in coming years, so let’s jump in.

Let’s start with the regional allies – Japan and Australia. Together with the US, these three countries have formed a trilateral alliance, which will help shape the power balance in the Pacific. Australia has been a close ally for decades and will continue to be just that. Japan is a more recent member of Washington’s inner circle and has joined for one big reason – China.

Japan, Australia and the US partnership has struck a strategic balance of power with Russia and China. This region’s future will depend upon where other regional powers decide to place their allegiance. Given China’s internal challenges and Russia’s apparent problems, it could (will?) turn chaotic very quickly.

We’ll be watching the dynamics unfold in East Asia over the coming years, and I expect no shortage of excitement.

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 are continuing our Post American series about what the world will look like, where the hotspots will be after the United States for trenches from its current position. Coming to you from the Eagle’s Nest wilderness just below Gore Lake. And today we are going to discuss the East Asian rim. This one is a little bit of an anomalous issue considering the series.

But whatever in that, this is an area that the Americans are going to remain very engaged in. Part of it, it’s about managing the Chinese decline, but in part it’s because the United States has a couple of very powerful, creative, capable allies that Americans appreciate. The first one is Australia, which is arguably the staunchest ally of the United States has, and it is always for two years at least served as a bit of a a deputy for American interest in Southeast Asia, which is a region that the United States is interested in, but has never really had the time to give the amount of attention that it deserves.

And that’s where the Australians come in. They’ve got excellent relations with most of the countries in the region, most notably Singapore and Indonesia. And then of course you’ve got New Zealand. There is a sidekick. Anyway, part of the reason that the United States has given nuclear powered submarines and a free trade deal to the Australians is because they’ve been so loyal and so long in areas that are out of theater.

They participated in Vietnam and Korea, they participate in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’ve always been there because they know at the end of the day, if they don’t have a partnership with the Americans, then they are on their own and they can read a map and they realize they’re wildly outnumbered in the region. So it is a strategy that they’ve been following for decades, the strategy that has borne a lot of fruit and is a strategy that will continue to serve them well into the future.

The other country is more of a newcomer, and that’s Japan. Now, throughout the Cold War, the Japanese were a bit combination of seething and shell shocked. They had been defeated soundly in World War Two. They had been nuked twice, which was something that didn’t happen to Nazi Germany. And the postwar settlements were, if anything, harsher on the Japanese than they were on the Germans.

And so there’s always this lingering nationalist ideal in Japan that wanted to move beyond the American Alliance network of the Cold War. But between the defeats, the occupation, American military force and the Soviets and the Chinese right there, they never really had that choice. Well, over the last 15 years, politics in Japan have evolved. It’s not that the nationalism has gone now, but the Chinese have become a much more clear and present danger than they thought the Chinese could ever be.

And the Russians, with their weakness in the Ukraine war, are showing themselves to be wobbly, which means that the Japanese have become very thoughtful about what their possibilities might become, that some things may not be what they thought. Some might be harder. Some might be easier. And in that sort of mindset, when you’re dealing with a demographic that is in terminal decline, you realize you probably are not going to be able to go it alone.

So it’s best to look for partners who are going to see the world through a similar lens, and that has led them willingly back to the United States over the course of the last 15 years. The Japanese have built a pair of very large carriers, quite super carriers, but the aircraft that operate from them are the Joint Strike Fighter that is made in the United States and the Japanese getting closer and closer and closer and managed to strike a deal both with the Trump and with the Biden administration on the future of bilateral relations.

So it’s not that Japan is not capable. It’s the second most powerful navy in the world by most measures. It’s that Japan has chosen that rather than going it alone, it’s opening the door on a protracted partnership with the United States and with Australia, and that puts major American power at three points of the Pacific bracketing nicely where the Russians are and where the Chinese are.

So for the future of this region, it’s going to come down to how powers do or do not get along with the Trilateral Alliance. Some, like the Chinese, are destined to break not probably because of military confrontation, but because of their own internal issues, which means this is going to be a zone of chaos. Opportunity carpetbagging for those of you who bothered to learn Mandarin or something like that.

It’s going to be impossible to put troops on the ground and stabilize something the size of China, even if you wanted to. So it’s probably just going to be a security black hole for a good long time. And then there’s other powers like Taiwan or Korea that get along pretty well with the United States and to a lesser degree, the Japanese, but are going to have to decide just how hand-in-glove they want to work.

This is one of those things that popped up earlier this year when the Biden administration had the Japanese and the Koreans to Camp David to basically hammer out a peace deal that dates back not to World War Two, but to 1905 when the Japanese occupied and colonized the Koreans. If if if the Japanese and the Koreans can agree to get along, then we can have a mini globalization in East Asia, because Taiwan’s almost a rounding error at that point that also involves Southeast Asia.

But if the Koreans decide to go a different direction, then there’s a very big security problem because the Japanese will never be secure so long as the Koreans are a hostile power. So a lot of this remains a an act in progress. But we’re starting to see the outlines of a post Russia, post Chinese Asia already. And it speaks with an Australian in the Japanese accent.

All right. That’s it. By.

The US and Iran: Deciding What to Bomb

Three US soldiers were killed in a drone attack carried out by an Iranian militia near the Jordan-Syria border. I expect a timely retaliation by the US, but what will that look like?

The Biden administration could choose to target Iranian-backed militias, Iranian military assets, or even Iran’s economy directly. Some of these are a bit more involved, but disrupting oil exports wouldn’t take much more than a fly-by of Iran’s primary export terminal on Kharg Island.

There will likely be global repercussions regardless of which option the US chooses; however, given the United States limited reliance on Middle Eastern energy, disrupting that system could prove beneficial for North American interests.

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 the 29th of January and the news today is that in a rocket attack, a Iranian militia operating near the border of Jordan in Syria managed to get a missile into an American base and kill three people in the vicinity of one of the barracks. These are the first deaths of American military personnel since the Iranians started pushing groups like the Houthis to attack Americans and international commerce in a large volume.

And it’s probably going to merit a response. Something to keep in mind is when the United States couple of weeks ago decided to start taking military action against the Houthis in Yemen. It wasn’t because these Iranian backed groups were attacking commerce in general. It’s because they fired an anti-ship missile at a U.S. military vessel, and that’s what started it all off.

So working from that same logic, now that some Americans have actually died, you can expect the Biden administration to strike back. The question is how? There’s kind of three things to consider. None of the options are great. Option number one, you do a semi proportionate because the Americans always believe in overkill assault against the militias that Iran backs either in the area in question or somewhere in the broader Middle East.

The problem with this is it doesn’t solve the problem. The people who are doing the attacks aren’t Iranian. They’re just using Iranian equipment and sometimes a little bit of Iranian intel. And even if you were to wipe them all out, they come from sectarian groups who are opposed to their local geopolitical orders. And so they tend to oppose Sunni groups who tend to be in the majority, especially in places like Jordan or in the case of Iraq, where you have a pseudo democracy.

And in these cases, even if you take them all out, you just have an aggrieved minority that would, again, push people in that the Iranians would recruit. So it might make things calm down for a few weeks to months, but it’s certainly not any sort of lasting solution that’s going to change the logic in Tehran at all. The second option is to strike military assets in Iran proper.

The idea is you go after the personnel that are making these decisions. The problem here is that there’s a lot of them. Iran isn’t like most strongman autocracies. You’ve got a ruling elite of the religious, the class, the mullahs, who’s over 10,000 people. And even if you were to somehow magically carry out an assassination program and within 24 hours, kill the top thousand of them, I mean, sure, they’d have some reshuffling, but it actually wouldn’t disrupt the regime in any meaningful way.

In addition, Iran is a series of mountains. It’s basically a fortress. And if you wanted to go in there and knock the government out, you would need a force significantly larger than what the United States pushed into Iraq, which is ultimately a flat and somewhat desert community. And that means you’re going over a mountain range in mountain range and mountain range.

So the distances are far. The logistics would be hard. The geography plays to the defenders strength. And then even if you were successful, well, then what are you going to stick around and try to reconstruct Iran in the way that we did Iraq? I think I think the U.S. learned that that’s not an easy thing to do. So and again, this wouldn’t change any of the logic in Iran about what they’re doing in the broader reading, if anything, were to intensify it.

That leaves us with the third option, which is a military option against Iran’s economy. Now, Iran, while it is nowhere near the peak that it once was back in the seventies, is an oil producer. What it was exporting, more than 4 million barrels a day is still in the game and still exports about a million barrels a day.

And that income is the primary source of hard currency that the Iranians use to fund everything that they do from purchasing social stability, from their population at home to funding these rocket attacks against U.S. military targets throughout the broader region. And unfortunately for the Iranians, it all flows through a single point called Kharg Island, which is on the northeast shore of the Persian Gulf.

And it would be very, very, very easy for the United States just to destroy the loading facilities or maybe even the storage tanks and the pumping stations in Kharg. They could probably do it with a handful of sorties, would probably take less than an hour. Iranian missile defense is is not very good. Their air defense is not very good either in the U.S. obviously is very good at striking in those sorts of conditions, especially when you’re talking about something that is on the coast.

So you don’t have to fly over too many defensive layers to get to it. It’d be a cost to this, of course, should the United States decide to do this step. It would take the role of the erstwhile global guarantor of maritime security and have the United States taking very discrete shots at very specific parts of the global economy that have relied upon international security in order to function.

And that means that any vessels that are part of a long supply chain along sail going through a dangerous area, near a dangerous area, or have multiple supply chain stops, meaning that if you interrupt just one of them, all of them become defunct. All of that would be in danger. And that is the entire electronics supply chain in Southeast Asia and East Asia.

That is the entire oil supply chain which either is sourced from or passes through the Middle East. The consequences of that would be significant on a global basis. But if you want to take the American populist view, which is something that Biden and Trump agree on, is that a lot of that doesn’t really matter. And in fact, there’s something to be said for stalling those international systems because they favor North American solutions.

The United States doesn’t get energy from this region anymore. Canada doesn’t, Mexico doesn’t. So the economies that we care about the most are heavily insulated already. And the economy that we’re most dependent upon or the most concerned about is China. And they get all of their energy from Pittsburgh reach that well, not all, but like half. And so if the Biden administration does take this step, two things will very much be in motion very quickly.

Scandinavia, After America

Today’s video comes from Doubtful Sound during my backpacking trip to New Zealand. We’re talking about an area in northern Europe fractured by history – the Scandinavian region. What was once a series of powerful and interconnected Viking port cities has been a fairly sleepy backwater for the past 300 years…but it might be time for a family reunion.

If there’s one thing that can get the family back together, it’s a common enemy. And Russia is the big bad wolf. This cluster of countries will reunite with similar geopolitical orientations, absent external powers pulling them apart, and Sweden will be at the center of it all.

The Brits and the Americans will be the best options for external allies. The Brits want to hold onto their naval independence, and preventing a single power (like Russia) from emerging is in their best interest. For a very small price, the Americans would gain a powerful ally that punches above its weight and dovetails with American power.

While we might not see epic battles as portrayed in the show “Vikings,” this cluster of Scandinavian countries will be a region to watch 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.

Texas Did Not Fall Down: Energy Grid Updates

With cold fronts rushing through much of the country, the Texas power grid had lots of eyes on it this past week. Thankfully, some “updates” over the past couple years have helped the Texans avoid catastrophe.

There’s a handful of reasons this storm was weathered: a shorter cold snap, regulatory changes, and structural updates. The first one is self-explanatory, but let’s breakdown the last two.

Governor Abbot introduced a series of winterizing efforts following the 2021 crisis, which enabled the natural gas system to continue operating through the storm. The winterizing technology used is over 50 years old, so I use the term – updates – loosely.

As for the structural updates, Texas is a bit ahead of the game; they’ve introduced some ‘Texas-sized’ wind turbines and expanded solar capacity. Combine the expansion in clean energy and a more reliable natural gas baseload system, Texas had its bases covered.

These changes made in Texas are just one example of how global energy systems will adapt and evolve over the next few decades.

Well, it seems that I pulled a NASA and mixed-up meters and feet... ... but hey, at least no rovers were harmed in this story. Around the 4:45 mark of the video, I begin discussing improvements made to wind turbines and I mention that they are 800 meters tall and approaching the 1km barrier. This should have been *800 FEET TALL* and *APPROACHING 1,000 FEET TALL*. I apologize for the mistake and appreciate everyone calling out the error.

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. Winters here. I’m coming to you from Eastern Washington. And today we’re going to talk about winter in Texas. Now, if you guys remember back a couple of years and it was 2021, Texas got hit by a cold storm and basically everything collapsed. All of their energy generation, especially natural gas, just ceased functioning and 200 people died over the course of a couple of weeks because of the loss of electricity.

That has not repeated with this cold front, even though by many measures in most parts of the state, temperatures got a little bit lower. So five things are different now compared to what happened back in 2021. First of all, while it did get as colder, even a little colder, the cold snap wasn’t quite as long. It didn’t last like the two and a half weeks like it did last time.

So the system wasn’t put under as much long term stress. But the bigger issues have to do with organizational and structural changes that the Texans have implemented. The big driving factor for things on the legal side of the regulatory side was Governor Abbott, who had spent a lot of time before 2021 making fun of California for the rolling brown and blackouts because they just have a horrible grid and a horrible energy system.

And then, of course, in Texas you had two or two people die. So he was personally motivated to make some changes and he pushed them through the legislature, which forced the regulatory structures in Texas to adjust. And the biggest part of those changes affected the natural gas industry. So Texas, before 2021 didn’t have its natural gas system winterized at all.

And there’s a lot of water vapor that comes up as a byproduct of natural gas production. And a lot of time it’s in the gathering pipes. So what would happen when we got to subfreezing temperatures is that water vapor would condense into liquid and you go virtually condense into ice and then clogged the pipes. So the entire system across, especially northern Texas in the Dallas area, froze up.

And so there was no fuel to burn, to do everything else. For political reasons, Abbott blamed the wind industry because, you know, when dad stopped going, but it was mostly natural gas that carries the backbone of power generation in Texas, and that is what failed most spectacularly. So in order to get things going, they actually had to waive almost all of their safety regimens and regulations and people were going out with acetylene torches to manually melt the pipes.

And of course, natural gas is flammable explosive. So we were kind of lucky that that didn’t get completely out of hand anyway. This time around, the changes in regulations forced producers across Texas to actually implement some of the best winterizing technologies that we had back in the 1960s. And the Texas grid now is on par with where Arkansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico were about 1975.

So, you know, this is some really basic stuff when it comes to things like insulation. Anyway, it was more than enough to make a difference. Okay. So that was the first big structural change. The other big structural changes had nothing to do with regulation. It’s just how things have evolved. So the new turbines, wind turbines that the Texans had put up more than 200 feet taller than the ones that were up three years ago.

And that means they reach higher. They tap stronger air currents that are more reliable. So even though the wind did drop, we hadn’t seen nearly the drop off in power generating capacity because the physical structure is now different. Second, Texas has put up a whole lot of solar. And when these winter storms come through Texas, usually what you get is a lot of wind, a lot of freezing rain, maybe some snow.

And then once they blow through, it’s cold. Well, but it’s clear air. And so when you have temperatures in the twenties, solar doesn’t really care what the temperature is unless it’s like crazy lower, crazy high. So solar was generating near record energy for the time of year. So you had two different streams of energy coming into the electrical system that they didn’t really have last time.

And they’re baseload system with natural gas worked a lot better than it did. This sort of change is the sort of thing we’re going to see in some way across not just Texas, but the entire country, the eventual world. We’re seeing more and more wind and water and more solar. And it doesn’t always go right the first time.

And we discover that meshing these systems together is more problematic than kind of the breezy things that the Greens say. But when you have multiple systems that do feed into the same network, you do get a lot of redundancy when one works and the other doesn’t. The trick is to make sure you have enough spare capacity that you can dispatch at any given time.

Now, in the past, solar and wind aren’t very good at that because you can’t dispatch them. If the sun’s out, out of the wind’s not blowing, they’re kind of useless. And you have to rely on older fossil fuel. Things like natural gas. But what we’re seeing in Texas specifically, as it were, already seeing turbines that are 800 meters tall.

But in the next year or two, we’re going to be pushing the kilometer tall barrier and again, stronger currents, more reliable use for baseload. So I don’t mean to suggest that all of these problems when it comes to storms and interruptions are going to go away. But as the technology evolves, we’re getting better able to adapt and having a little bit more insulation on the back side as well.

That’s it for me.

Sub-Saharan 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.

Next on the list in our ‘Post-American’ series is Sub-Saharan Africa. This region is filled with geographical challenges, slow growth and development, and several other obstacles, but a handful of countries will be alright.

Many of the countries in this region are a few decades behind the rest of the world, meaning their exposure to globalization is fairly limited. As the US steps back, these countries will experience less catastrophic fallout compared to fully globalized countries.

On the flip side, some countries, such as Senegal, Nigeria, Angola, South Africa, and the Kenya-Uganda corridor, will be taking on a more significant regional presence. These countries will likely benefit from partnerships with countries like France or Britain and investments to tap into their natural resources.

Remember, the diversity within Africa is unparalleled; between climates, development levels, education, and resources, the outcomes of deglobalization will vary from country to country and region to region.

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. And today we’re gonna do the next in our post-American series on what the world looks like as the United States steps back from managing the global system. Today we’re going to focus on Africa, specifically sub-Saharan Africa. So everything that’s south of the desert, this is not one region. It is one of the more heterodox regions on the planet.

First, going from north to south, you’ve got the Sahel, which is an area of near desert that has fickle precipitation, a stepping climate and generally weak governments and low population densities. This is countries like Mali or, say, Sudan. Then you move into a very, very, very, very thin, temperate belt that for from any normal point of view is more like Missouri.

And then you get into the deep reinforce of the heart of Africa, most notably the Congo. And then as you go further south, it starts to turn temperate again before ultimately ending in South Africa, which is probably has the best climate of any country in the region. Throughout this whole zone, there are pockets of deserts, of denser woodlands and jungle and of mountainous uplifts.

The biggest problem that the sub-Saharan Africans have always had is geography, because when you get to the coast, you’ll notice it goes straight up. Most parts of the coast you have a thousand meter rise in a very short amount of time, and that makes it almost impossible to build most sorts of physical infrastructure, especially rail lines. They just can’t get up that steepness.

And then once you get to the top of that and you go in a little bit more, there’s another one and another one. And in most places there’s five kind of broken stacks, layers. So getting physical connections, not just between countries, among countries, but within countries is very difficult. And so developing this area economically has always been difficult.

And that’s before you consider the deserts or the mountains or the jungles, which are three of the biomes out there that are most difficult for humans to kind of get a purchase in. There are exceptions to this, and those exceptions are going to prove to be the story of sub-Saharan Africa moving forward. There are a handful of places where you might have a chunk of relatively flat land with reasonable access to the coast, where in pockets you can build bits of infrastructure to connect the populations.

And the reason I talk about infrastructure is without that infrastructure, you’re living in a society that can really never break free if you can’t have a road and ideally a rail network within your own system, it’s hard to move goods. It’s hard to political authority, so hard to have political unification. But if you can do that, then you can have a zone where everyone kind of sees their economic bread being buttered the same way.

And that is the foundation. That’s the foundation of most modern societies. So let’s review what’s happening to the world then will apply that to the specific situation. We are losing international connectivity, the ability of ships to travel the ocean blue at scale, especially for things like energy, transport and multimodal multistep manufacturing supply chains. That’s going away. And if you are in Africa and you’ve never been able to develop industry of your own because of these reasons, you’re not going to now, most likely.

So you’re looking at a significant drop in the standard of living for most parts of Africa. But the only thing I can say that argues well for them is a number of these countries have not really advanced very far down the agricultural revolution. They don’t use a lot of tractors, they don’t use a lot of imported fertilizer. And so a lot of these places can take a step back from their partial industrialization, and they’re partial modernization and they’re partial urbanization back to the farm fields and therefore not suffer the sort of catastrophic food losses that we’re going to see in places like, say, China or Egypt.

They never advanced as far as far to fall. And even if they are food importers, it’s likely they’re going forward in 80% of their food. So, you know, that’s kind of one in the plus column. It might not look great, but a lot of these societies are going to absolutely fall apart. Second, capital, we have become used to Africa experiencing a bit of a growth story in the last 25 years because global capital markets have been really flush.

That’s because the baby boomers have been approaching retirement, but not yet retired and all the retirement savings is going wherever it can in order to earn a return. And that means going into Africa. But a lot of this money going into Africa was not spent on infrastructure development, but instead on consumption. So you’ve got a Greek style expansion of economic activity that was underlain by nothing but credit.

So that story, that story’s over. There’s no version of that that continues. So we’re looking at societal cracks D urbanization, but not population collapse and sharply lower levels of consumption as wealth levels drop and the access to credit drops. That’s the overall environment for the continent. sub-Saharan Africa, part of the continent. And that’s not great. But now let’s talk about those exceptions, the places where, you know, capital might still be applied because there is a greater bang for the buck.

Why? Why run a rail line up a cliff when you have a flat zone next to it? Now, those spots are limited. You’ve got Senegal, Nigeria, to a lesser degree, Angola, South Africa and the Kenya Uganda corridor. So let’s run through those real quick. Senegal, former French colony, relatively developed by Africans standards. And the French are going to be experience a renaissance both in terms of their own economy and their ability to reach out to their relatively near abroad.

And that means that Senegal is likely to experience a sort of a neo colonial fusion. I don’t mean to suggest it’s going to be conquered, but if you are the French in a post-American world and you’re looking for places to put a flag. Senegal tricks a lot of the boxes. So on the other side of Morocco, which would give you more influence in Morocco, it’s more economically viable.

It’s easier to penetrate in the interior. And these people, for the most part, already speak French. We all are a little bit racist. But the French are a lot more racist to Arabs than they are to Senegalese. They consider black sub-Saharan Africans to be more legitimate aspirants to the French identity than they do, say, Algerian Muslims. And so I expect a bit of a cooperation free trade deal association, neo imperial, if you want to call it, between the two countries.

Nigeria, who might be different. Major is a powerhouse. Oh, one of the fastest growing economies in the world produces based on the day somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5 million barrels a day of crude, a lot of natural gas exports, LNG, and is a country that has a foot in the Sahel and a foot in the tropics. It’s made up of a number of ethnic groups that have not always gotten along.

There has been a civil war there in the past. I don’t think that’s going to repeat any time soon because that infrastructure built out. There’s more integration among these peoples now. And if you are Britain or France or anyone in Europe who is looking for oil. Nigeria is a place that’s just way too powerful to conquer, but also not quite sufficiently competent to run everything on its own.

Think of it this way In the pre-industrial age, when the Brits conquered Nigeria as part of their imperial build out, they brought guns to no fights. Wasn’t a fair fight. Well, the Nigerians all have guns now. And while the Brits may have better guns, good guns versus bad guns are still guns versus guns. And you throw in that the Nigerians have countries.

What’s the population today? It’s a lot. You can’t have an old colonial conquering, especially since a lot of these people live on the coastal south where the oil is. The Brits, the French, the Americans are would just be incapable. And so you’ll get more of a negotiated partnership between the two. That’ll serve a lot more interests on both sides.

And goal is a fine one for Portuguese. Colony had a brutal civil war in the eighties and you could argue that the most bloodthirsty and brutal faction, the Mabunda, are the ones that won. But that means that they control the access to the coast. It’s a big place, but it’s kind of square and it’s only in the northwest section near the capital of Luanda, where you actually have a break in that coastal escarpment.

And that’s the land of the moon too. So the moon too didn’t just win the war. They occupied the most valuable real estate within the country itself. And similar to what’s going on with Nigeria, there’s going to be a partnership with someone an on the outside, someone who probably has a lot fewer ethical concerns when making deals for than most of the countries in Europe.

The problem here is technology. Almost all of Angola’s crude oil is produced in the deep offshore. Some of the more sophisticated wells that humans can produce from here. And no one in Angola knows how to do any of it. It’s all done by foreign partners. The Chinese can’t help, the Russians can’t help. It’s a very short list of countries.

Now, the Americans are probably broadly disinterested because of the security concern, because the distance and because the crude that primarily comes out of these deposits is very similar to the super light crude that comes out of American shale wells at home. So there’s not much of an economic or security case for the United States to get involved. The Brits and the French are solid contenders, as are the Norwegians, who are very socialist, very pro-human rights, and less involves anything with their energy company, in which case they’re money grubbing, backstabbing, human rights, smashing hyper capitalist, which is always fun.

But I think the better partner to look at is probably Brazil’s Petrobras. Now, Brazil in the future is going to have a lot of problems, but Petrobras is one of the world’s most technologically advanced companies, giving companies like Exxon Mobil a run for their money when it comes to deepwater and offshore, they have their own pre-salt system, which means going down through two miles of water than two miles a rock for them.

Angola is a possible partner. Then it really care about the ethical constraints and they both speak Portuguese. So there’s a lot of connectivity there. Okay, let’s see what’s next. South Africa, between a little bit of Highland and being so far from the equator, you’re talking about a primarily temperate climate here and that means even in the worst case scenario, South Africa will continue to be an agricultural superpower.

In a world that doesn’t have enough food. Then they also have the minerals. You’ve got the kimberlite deposits in the Bushveld area, which provide pretty much a little bit, if not a lot of everything that the United States needs material wise for the GreenTech expansion, for technology in general, and for anything involving electricity. No matter how the world evolves in the years to come, the relative stability of South Africa versus all of the other producers is just huge.

And you’re going to see South Africa just making money hand over fist. The problems of the South Africans will always have, however, are internal. One of the deals that was cut between the oppressed blacks and the ruling whites at the end of apartheid is we’re now politically equal. We all have votes. We can all property. But the whites didn’t want to give up the assets that they had built during apartheid.

So the deal was the whites can keep everything that they have at this moment. But the blacks, no matter who they are, no matter what part of the country they’re in, they get free housing forever. So you got roughly two thirds of the population of the country that lives in these things called townships, which are fenced in enclaves that don’t have plumbing.

And if you ever are driving through even some of the rich parts of South Africa, you’ll come across these checkerboard sections of the grid, the city grid, where there’s the walled in by porta potties, because that’s the only way that they could provide sewage. And as a result, you’ve got a 50% unemployment rate in the country. So this is going to break.

This is not sustainable politically, economically, and what it looks like, it’s going to shape the future of the country from now on. But they’ve got the minerals and they’ve got the agricultural production. So even in a severe mismanagement scenario where you may go down the route of Argentina or Zimbabwe, this is still going to be a massive producing zone.

And then finally, you’ve got Kenya, Uganda, para countries that are on a transport corridor where you have a break in those cliffs. These are areas with relatively dense population structures and an educational level that is easily the highest on the African continent. I would say that it is above South Africa, but remember, South Africa is this huge split between the whites and the non-whites.

So Kenyans and Ugandans are not as skilled as the whites, but they’re much more skilled than anyone else in South Africa. And that makes this the only part of Africa that can kind of go through at least a few of the steps of industrialization and getting into manufacturing. Remember here that we’re looking at a breakdown of a lot of the world with the Chinese system probably being at the top of the list.

So all that industrial capacity is either going to be lost or rebuilt somewhere else. And while I think a lot of it’s going to be coming back to North America and the smaller chunk to say Argentina and bits here and there for Europe in Africa can Uganda is the most likely place where they will be forced to build their own stuff.

So if you’re looking for a development play as opposed to a resource play in Kenya, Uganda, or where it’s going to be, just keep in mind, whenever people are talking about Africa, it’s not one thing. They’re over 50 countries. They’re in seven discrete biomes that don’t necessarily exist, an independent area. So you do have all these identities and fractured infrastructure.

It’s different stories, and that means some of them are going to do really badly and some of them are going to do the other thing.

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.

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited NAtions

The Absent Superpower

The accidental superpower

The End of the World is Just The Beginning

Disunited Nations

The Absent Superpower

The Absent Superpower

TranscripT

FOR MORE ON THE FUTURE OF EAST ASIA, SEE DISUNITED NATIONS

TranscripT

TranscripT

FOR MORE ON THE FUTURE OF Scandinavia, SEE DISUNITED NATIONS

TranscripT

FOR MORE ON THE FUTURE OF SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, SEE DISUNITED NATIONS

The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

TranscripT

TranscripT

The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

TranscripT

The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

TranscripT

The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

TranscripT

Join 200,000+ other subscribers

Stay Social

GEOPOLITICAL INSIGHT STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX