Despite the short-term emphasis placed on the title of president, chancellor, or prime minister, the reality is that leadership typically has minimal impact on the trajectory of a nation. The real movers are geography and demography; however, sometimes a leader can be the exception to that rule.
If you take the US, it’s clear that geographic security enabled a flexible and powerful military. If you look at German history, constant neighboring threats lead them down a different path. Demographic structures carry influence in all spheres of life. Younger demos can drive consumption and inflation, while an older, wealthier demo fuels investment and stability. Again, geography and demography are structural realities that are often “untouchable” by a singular leader.
And yet, there are pivotal moments when a leader (or single decision for that matter) can change the course of history. We’re talking about instances like Churchill’s stance during WWII or Zelensky’s defiance in the opening week of the Ukraine War. And now, Trump is pulling the US from its post-Cold War holding pattern and plunging it into a deglobalized system.
Trump’s leadership, coupled with his ability to appoint unqualified officials with little opposition, is a symptom of the disintegration of both major US political parties. Which means we’re entering a period where outside forces, like Russia, can weasel their way into American politics.
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Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here. Coming from Colorado. Today we’re launching into our new series on what the hell is going on in Washington. Over the last few weeks, The Donald Trump administration has taken a number of steps that I don’t think pushed the MAGA agenda at all. And can’t be explained away as incompetence or toddler syndrome or whatever you want to call it.
Something else is up. It seems like the actions were designed specifically to tear down American power over the long term. And so I want to start by talking about why normally leadership just doesn’t matter. All countries are shaped by two things, their physical environment, their geography and their population structure, their demography. You understand those two things.
You can understand the challenges, opportunities and tools in front of a country. So, for example, if you’re a country like the United States that is surrounded by oceans, you don’t have to spend a lot of resources on defending the homeland, especially not on land. And armies are expensive, both in terms of money and in terms of manpower.
So if you are freed up from that, you can then instead invest your people in doing something that will actually earn income and invest your military and naval forces, which, while not cheap, can be wherever you need them to be. And so you basically get a much more mobile military force, and you get to choose the time and the place of when a conflict happens, rather than the other way around.
Another good example are the Germans. They are surrounded by potential competitors the Dutch, the French, the Austrians, the poles, the Russians, the Swedes and off the coast, the Brits. And so no matter where the Germans look, they face a potential threat. And throughout all of German history, until very recently, the goal was always to consolidate as quickly as you can, develop as quickly as you can, just in a panic, and then eliminate one of the threats so you can focus on the others.
And this generated a very hostile, erratic, rapid German economic and security policy that eventually triggered a couple of wars. That ended the European order, as it was until World War Two. And it was only with the creation of the European Union and NATO where the Germans were no longer, viewed themselves as surrounded by enemies but surrounded by allies, that this finally changed, of course, that shaped their economy because they still have that built in.
And so they focused everything on industrial activity because that’s what they knew. And because the frantic miss in the culture never really went away. They just focused it differently, which was triggered some of the economic problems that the Europeans are having. Now. You can play this for any country. Open borders means you have to have an army and you’re going to be a little nervous if you’ve got a rampart between you and everyone else, like, say, the Chileans versus the rest of the world.
With, the Andes Mountains, you get a culture that can be very productive, a pretty laid back because you’re not facing any sort of threat on a regular basis. And then everybody in between. That’s for demographic structure. It’s a question of balance among people who were under the age of 18, roughly 18 to 45, 45 to 65, and retired that first category.
Those kids to expensive. And you have to house them, clothe them, feed them, educate them. And for most adults, raising your kids is the most expensive thing you will ever do. Certainly more expensive than purchasing a house, but it does generate a lot of consumption, which generates a lot of economic activity
Next group, 18 to roughly 45. These are your young workers. These are typically your parents. And just like with the kids, lots and lots of consumption because they’re buying homes, getting educated, and, buying cars. So we have a relatively low value added workforce, but still a lot of consumption and a lot of inflation, and you got people 45 to 65. The kids are moving out. The house has probably been paid for and they’re preparing for retirement. They’re also paying a lot of taxes because they’re experienced workers that are very productive with high incomes.
So this is the tax base. This is the capital stock. This is the stock market. And then when you retire whatever assets you’ve accrued, you want to protect them. So you move out of things that are relatively risky, like say the stock market and go into things that aren’t like cash or property, and then you basically just whittle away at it until you pass on.
Every country has all of these categories. The question is the balance. If you have a lot of young people, you have a consumption led system that tends to be inflationary. It’s also easier to build an army. If you have a more mature system, you’re going to have a little bit more capital, a lot more industrial capacity. It might be easier to do a Navy.
It’s got an advanced population 45 plus. The capital you have is massive, and your ability to invest in technology and be making yourself a technocracy is a very real possibility. And usually countries that are in this stage have some amazing growth patterns. But it’s not from consumption, it’s from investment, it’s from technological breakthroughs. It’s from the application of those technologies.
And then eventually you retire and everything stops. What does all this have to do with leadership? Well, very little. You can’t leader your way out of your borders without a war. And while wars do happen, consolidate and whatever the territory on the other side is a multi-generational thing. And the consolidation usually matters more than the conquering.
So when you look back at, say, American history, as we expanded westward through the continent, we don’t remember the politicians like Paul King, those who came before that actually expanded the borders very well. We think of the politicians that successively turned the country into something else. On the other side of that, we think of Eisenhower. It’s a different sort of work.
It takes time, and it takes a lot longer than any one leader ever has. Even if you happen to be a despot who happens to be a genius and you take over at age 22 and you rule your entire life, this is the stuff not so much of decades, but of centuries. Same and population policy. Let’s say we had a really robust population policy that really encouraged large scale childcare to allow workers to both work and have kids.
Well, that’s not going to hit economic headlines for 25 years, because you have to wait for the kids to grow up and become adults themselves. Leaders just don’t change that. But every once in a while, we have a moment in history where the decisions that are made in the short term don’t just matter. But after everything. A great example is Churchill, during the Blitz, could have surrendered, cut a peace deal with the Nazis.
But no, he decided to make his country and unsinkable aircraft carrier and pray that the winds of time would be favorable. It was a gamble. It worked, and history would have turned out very, very differently had he, not me personally. I put Zelensky’s quote to Ukrainian president of, when the Chechen hit squads were closing in and the United States offered evacuation.
He says, I don’t need a ride. I need ammo. That changed the course of the war. And without that decision, this conflict in Ukraine not only would have been over a lot longer, we’d have a lot more dead Ukrainians than we have now, but we’d already probably be hit deep in a war on the plains of Poland.
We’ve been at one of these moments for arguably the longest window, in human history, for these last 35 years. Ever since the Cold War ended, the world has kind of been in this weird little transition period where the old globalized system of the US, built to build an alliance to fight the Cold War, was mostly maintained, and the structures of globalization on the economic side were mostly maintained.
But we’ve all been kind of a holding pattern to see what the United States was going to do. And most of my work, most notably my first book, The Accidental Superpower, is about this dichotomy and how it can’t last, and that sooner or later, the United States is going to move on to something else, whether it’s something internally, something regionally, the Western Hemisphere, or sees something shiny elsewhere.
And this whole system was going to end anyway. But no world leader, no American leader really took advantage of that moment to do something or take us in a different direction. Until now. And that person who is doing something is Donald Trump. But rather than translating American power of this moment into a new system that will last for decades, he seems to be tearing it down.
Which is why we’re doing the series. There’s something else to consider about why Trump has been so successful and is faced so few obstacles. And it’s more than just the fact that the United States military is more powerful than everyone of the allies combined. It has to do with what’s going on in the United States, because our political system is not stagnant.
It evolves, too. And every generation or so, the factions that make up our political parties move around. And in those periods and these windows of opportunity, in these transition moments and these interregnum politics become unstuck. So I would argue that what we’ve seen in the last 15 years is a complete disintegration of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, other apparatus and loyalty system.
In that environment, MAGA was able to hijack and take over the Republican Party quite successfully, whereas the Democrats more or less just dissolved as an institution. We’re in the transition process here. We are not seeing anything close to what the end result will be for the next period of American history. But at this moment in time, the institutions which are based on the parties, which are based on the people are in flux.
And I think the best example I can highlight for that is what’s gone on in the US Senate. No American president has ever had all of his cabinet appointees approved. You have to get confirmed by the Senate with a majority except Donald Trump and phase two. And without a doubt, this is the least qualified cabinet we have ever seen in American history.
And every single one of them have gotten through. We’ve gotten a guy who pledged publicly to turn the FBI into a vindication engine, specifically to prosecute the president’s opponents, confirmed. We get a vaccine skeptic who’s a complete nut job confirmed. We get an agricultural secretary who’s never been on a farm, confirm, and we get a defense secretary whose military experience is limited and has absolutely no experience in policy.
Whatever confirmed all of them got through, all of them got through quickly. All of them got through easily. This is not my army. This is not the power of Trump’s charisma. This is an issue that we are in one of these moments where the institutions are in flux, most notably the political parties in this case. And until that firms back up, the Senate has basically abdicated responsibility and that provides opportunities for others who are much more organized, who are not going through this sort of flux to exercise their will.
Which will bring us to the Russians. And we’ll tackle them tomorrow.
