US Foreign Policy After Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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