Russia Collapse , Trade, Energy, Recession , Upcoming Election & More || Peter Zeihan Full interview

geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan as he discusses the potential collapse of Russia, its trade dynamics, energy challenges, and economic recession. With the upcoming elections on the horizon, Zeihan delves into the intricate geopolitical implications and what they mean for global stability. Gain a deeper understanding of how these factors intertwine and what the future might hold for Russia and the world. Don’t miss this comprehensive analysis of current events and strategic insights from one of the leading experts in the field.
special thanks to ‎@ZeihanonGeopolitics 
#russia #peterzeihan #economy #trade

fewer Republicans than Democrats remember the Republicans have never won a national election unless they can carry the independence by a factor of two to one it’s just math this using the most recent trustworthy polling data if you were to have a drop dead vote when this data came out the red States would go red because they have enough Republicans to win without the independence the blue States would go Democrat because they have enough votes to win without the independence and the purples are the ones in in the wind in this steady state relationship and I realize nothing is ever equal in politics the Democrats have to screw up or the Republicans have to reach out the base situation for our the Electoral College favors the Democrats just because of positioning people seem to have forgotten what happened in the last midterms with one exception every single candidate that Donald Trump put his finger on lost the independent vote four to one why because Donald Trump told political Independents that their vote doesn’t matter he told them that the only thing that matters is the primary system where he dominates and their response was hold my beer for only the third time in the history of the Republic the ruling party gained seats in the house and the other two examples happened during Reconstruction which I can all think we agree was a special time that’s the second reason that Donald Trump has no chance in the general election the third is Robert Kennedy Donald Trump thought he had cornered the crazy vote and now it’s split Trump is going to lead what’s left of the Republican party to the second or third worst electoral defeat in American history and this will be the last election that the Republican Party contests now before you R for the pitchforks or throw me out of the building this isn’t the end of the conservative movement this is just the end of the current Republican party we have been through this now six times we will get through this transition the question is what forms up on the other side oh sorry let’s skip that these two people are already working on that when I spoke to speaker Ryan last October he said that now is the beginning of the fight for the soul of the conservative movement not the Republican party that fight’s lost conservative movement within the next two months Mike Pence dropped out of the race and started a think tank to start imagining what that might look like and when Trump defeated Haley for the presidential nomination she joined a think tank to do the same thing I’m not saying that a stuffy midwesterner or a part-time Southerner are the solution to this I’m just saying that we’re already one foot into figuring out what is next whether it will be better or worse depends upon who joins what faction and how the various political faction in this country consolidate around a new sense of ideals and for those of you think that I’m a believeing hurt Democrat the Democrats are like only four years behind the Republicans on the disintegration and as we have seen from our previous five rearrangements whichever party figures their internal doubt first tends to rule without opposition for a quarter Century I would argue that while the Republicans are clearly going to lose the presidency in the house this round and because of Trump’s convictions maybe even the Senate they actually have a reasonable chance of emerging in the seventh party structure in a superior position because they started earlier one caveat Biden has to not die non zero chance okay let’s talk about some much more important things than American politics these are money supplies most important two on here are the yellow that’s China and the blue that’s the United States what we got right here this is qe1 two and three check out how it’s Fallen back uhuhuh like for those of us who about economic training what something we all agree on is if you print currency like mt if you monetize the debt you get inflation do you look at China their money supply is twice out of ours they’re exporting deflation not inflation the reason is that the rules are changing these are the three biggest economies in the world outside the United States they are all in terminal demographic decline what is monetary policy except a series of tools that you use to regulate demand and if three of the four biggest economies in the world are looking at ever smaller levels of demand moving forward then the rules the laws the guidelines that we have developed over this last 500 years of economic history don’t apply anymore we are going to have to make up an entirely new economic theory for our world in demographic decline we are only starting that now some people say modern monetary theory is the way of the future some people say it’s suicidal I say let’s let someone give it a go do I think it’s going to work God know but we’ll learn something and I would rather learn something in a time of relative abundance and peace than have someone like the Germans or the Japanese make something up on the fly when they’re desperate because they’ve done that before and we know how that goes now here in the United States here in North America the Canadians have found a patch to their demographic problems we’re still doing pretty well the Mexicans even a little bit better than us we have time at our current pace of Aging in North America we won’t face a German or a Japanese or a Korean or a Chinese style crisis until 2017 we can watch everyone else wrestle with this over the next half century and hopefully we will learn something even if it’s all it is is learning what not to do we’ve got time but we have never had the emergence and Adoption of a new economic theory as a species historically without a major war because that breaks things all right this is not the federal deficit this is the net increase in government spending year on year so if you had a $4 trillion doll deficit last year and A5 trillion doll deficit this year it’ll come in at one trillion on this so these increases wow unprecedented in modern history even in Wartime this is the private credit curve showing annual increases so I showed you the smooth one that had the total these are the annual increases year on year now you would expect and this is reflected in the data that in times of economic stress the government sits in the driver’s seat pumps money into the system to encourage a recovery while private credit takes a backseat as the system has a recession and recovers that’s what happened in the com bust in the subprime bust and in covid this is normal I mean maybe I would rather have the Orange Line Bel lower but this is normal it’s still reflecting the patterns we’re supposed to have this is what worries me for the first time in American history the paths crossed without an economic crisis and government new government spending exceeded total new private credit historically speaking that has only ever happened ever in five economies B Germany Zimbabwe in the 2000s Venezuela in the 2010s Argentina like nine times and Greece just before the sub or their bust that’s it I worry about this now it’s only one data point I don’t want to make this bigger than it is might be fixed this year but government spending has now emerged Ed today in a time of economic wealth as the single most important determining factor in economic strategy here in the United States that is not how it’s supposed to work and if you think forward over the next 25 years as we digest the retiring Boomers we’re going to be looking at a net increase in government spending about 2% a year just to fund their pensions and healthare which means that that orange line is going to rise and it’s it’s not clear that the blue line can keep up so if you want to worry about something from a macroeconomic point of view it’s not the deficit per se it’s the imbalance now hopefully we will find out in six months that this is just oneof and it’s no big deal but with Biden and Trump both saying they plan to not only not slash any uh entitlement programs and both plan to expand government spending and both plan to cut taxes I have my doubts okay let’s talk Ukraine uh this is what’s called a Fab 1500 1500 is for its weight in kilograms so it weighs roughly a ton and a half of that 1500 about two-thirds of it is explosive power the Soviets excelled at Big bombs like these whenever the United States goes to war it’s on a different continent typically in a different Hemisphere and so we have to travel a long distance which means that our weapon systems can’t be based on weight and bulk they have to be based on range and above all else Precision so we have small bombs typically less than 500 pounds that we deliver at range to hit within a few feet of what we’re aiming at you remember that the J dams from Desert Storm some of these younger people are like desert what designed to hit within roughly 10 meters of their target we have now gotten that down to less than 10 feet of their target range Precision not this this has a blast radius of a third of a kilometer so the Russians don’t fight on a different hemisphere they fight along their border and so they can have shorter supply lines with bigger bombs and they just throw huge amounts of ordinances at their target and if they miss that’s fine it’s got a big Blass radius and they have four more lined up they have not been using these in Ukraine because they’re not accurate until recently the Battle of Aida which was a couple months ago they used 300 of these in less than 36 hours just completely obliterated the defender positions why the change in strategy well they started putting something called a flight kit on it that’s basically what we do with jdams and that allowed this thing to hit not with an accuracy of a quarter of a mile but within about 50 meters from our point of view that’s laughable accuracy but if you got a blast radius of a third of a mile it’s enough and in the last six weeks they’ve started dropping these in civilian areas specifically going after power infrastructure they’re no longer using those little Shahed moped drones to go after Transformers they’re dropping these big boys on power plants and that’s not something you repair in a few weeks that’s something that takes at least 18 months and so the entirety of Southern and Eastern Ukraine the lights have gone out and they’re having to bring in power from elsewhere different sort of War makes it very hard to defend because the only way you can prevent this thing from hitting is to hit the plane that launched it before it drops it and the planes for the most part never leave Russian airspace not that the ukrainians aren’t innovating on the left you’ve got an Ukrainian domestically built Beaver drone the ukrainians are many things I would never put them in charge of PR it’s a horrible name it’s got a range of about 500 miles it’s got a payload of about 100 pounds it uh doesn’t fly by a wire it flies by GPS coordinates so Telemetry the bottom left that is an americanmade Phoenix ghost and it has not been destroyed it’s in a state of assembly it’s modular so you can take it apart one dude can carry in a backpack the whole thing weighs about 50 pounds of that about 10 to 15 pound Warhead it only has a range of maybe 20 to 30 miles and only a warhead of about 10 to 15 pounds uh but it’s sight controlled what they’ve been doing the ukrainians is they’ve been using the Beavers launching from Ukrainian territory to go after the distillation towers and refineries across the Russian space and then they’ve been sending Special Forces with the Phoenix ghosts into Russia proper to launch them from really close in and at this point they’ve taken about 15% of Russian refining capacity offline in their campaign so far in the last three months they have done more economic damage to the Russian system than two and a half years of sanctions it’s different sort of War both sides are going after the other’s physical infrastructure at scale for the first time and then there’s us on the left you’ve got a population density map over here you’ve got Road and Rail Road in blue rail in black and you’ve got Ukraine here and here what’s happened in the last week is the Biden Administration has given clearance almost all of NATO has given clear to the ukrainians to use the weapon systems we have provided to go after places in Russia proper on the other side of the border that are launching attacks into Ukraine in real time so for example going after the bases that those Fighters are dropping the Glide bombs from in that two places matter more than the others this is a city called belgrad and this is Rost ofand Don they are the two Russian population censors closest to the Ukrainian border and they are the two logistical hubs that the Russians have been using for all of their military Transit if there is going to be an end to this war and Ukraine is going to continue to exist those two centers need to be neutralized in some way and for the first time in the war the ukrainians were able to take the war to belgrad this last week they’ve been going after air defense rail Depot fuel Depots Amal dumps and the Russians are starting to evacuate the city will it be enough way too soon to tell we’re in weak one but this is the shape of the war the rules are changing the parameters are changing I know that the front really hasn’t moved much in the last year and a half but this is actually one of the most dynamic Wars I have ever studied because every month there’s a new weapon system is’s a new tactic people are trying new things all the time I don’t know how this is going to go I mean I’m one of the few people who predicted that this war had to happen and I was probably among the most optimistic about Ukraine’s chances and even I thought they were going to lose completely within a year we were all wrong and we all reassessed with new data and we were all wrong again I don’t know how this is going to go but I know who’s going to be there at the end of it start with the Russians do I have a laser here okay that cut at the top of the red that’s the postc Cold War collapse when the Russian death rate almost tripled and the birth rate dropped by 2third and held there for 15 years now we know that that is accurate because in 2003 the Russians did their first post Soviet census their only posts Soviet census and five years later they stopped collecting Census Data altogether and just started making it up so this bulge here among teenagers probably doesn’t exist at all that’s why the Russians launched this war while they did they don’t have another generation to try if they were going to use a mass military approach it had to be about now Ukrainian data is undoubtedly more accurate and you can see how bad that is this is Russia’s last war they’ve already between defections out migration deaths and casualties lost a million and a Half Men they can keep up the pace of what they’re doing for another six to eight years but then they’re done as a military power at all and for Ukraine a third of the population are either displaced or refugees especially among the younger folks especially among women especially among educated people which means win or lose Ukraine ceases to function as a modern industrialized nation state within 30 years even if they win and within 60 years the Ukrainian ethnicity will vanish from this Earth everyone is fighting for time if the Russians win they have an external security Cordon that’s a little bit more sustainable but eventually they die from lack of population if the ukrainians win they still die out in a generation or two and we’re just trying to hold it open because we know the Russians are going down and if they’re fighting here they’re not flinging nuk nukes at Atlanta we’re all Fighting For time and our alliance structure is also on borrowed time Italy and Germany are the two most advanced demographies in the western world and within 15 years we will have to decide whether we want to pay to continue for them to exist because they won’t be able to do it themselves if there is a future to the Atlantic Alliance it involves these four countries Sweden France healthiest demographies in the rich world after the United States and Poland now Poland has a real problem but it still has a bulge of people in their 30s and early 40s so if they all have four kids there will still be a Poland 40 years from now but in the meantime these are the four countries that will decide what Europe looks like thank God Sweden’s in NATO now in Asia similar story our three closest allies Taiwan Korea and Japan are aging now 20 years tops is what the big two have left Taiwan might have 30 if there is a future it’s with these guys luckily the vietnames do not have a grudge against us for the war they just saw it as a little scuffle there’s this fun little Monument Garden in Hanoi and there’s a monument about that tall that’s the monument to the American Vietnamese conflict because it lasted 20 years and there’s one about that tall to the Vietnamese fr French conflict which as about two decades and then there’s a three story one to the Vietnamese Chinese war that they call the 2,000 years war these are good allies okay let’s just close up with the Border because that’s a simple problem three things number one the US Mexico border is 2,000 miles long this is population density by the way and it’s almost completely Frontier most of is completely unpopulated it is the most difficult Border in the world to secure and I would argue that Donald Trump did it by the stupidest possible way by trying to build a wall think about what is required to build a wall 2,000 miles long you have a minimum of 50 Supply roads that go from populated America across the greatest natural barrier on the continent the sonor and the Chihuahuan deserts to reach the construction sites so half of the greatest buffer the greatest block to human movement you have now paved and if you’re South of the Border and you can increase your income by a factor of seven by using a ladder once wouldn’t you history will record Donald Trump as the greatest friend to illegal migrants in American history that’s problem one problem two is policy by building the wall but leaving trade with Mexico flowing and incidentally that is not something we want to break down concentrated people without ladders into specific areas and they started tapping Asylum law so instead of trying to cross unnoticed they want to declare their presence and get in the queue now if we were to process everyone who wants an asylum claim we would need to expand the Department of Immigration and the related judicial branches by a factor of 20 and they know this so they get in the queue they get a court date which doesn’t have a firm day attached to it and they’re released it’s a really smart plan if you’re a migrant now what Donald Trump did is he broke and ended every inward migration program the United States has except for the H1B Visa everything else is down to zero and before you think I’m anti-trump Biden went and codified all of that why the unions are in the political wind and the issue they care the most about is migration so we won’t get a meaningful immigration policy in this country until the unions finally pick aide nobody wants to piss them off so that’s where we are fortifying the Border accelerates migration doing it through the Asylum program accelerates migration and so Joe Biden in the last week has done something what I find hilarious you remember a few months ago when the hard-right Republicans insisted that certain really onerous restrictions get put into the new immigration law that Congress was negotiating the restrictions that they put in made it into the would be law Trump then said I don’t want this law to be signed because it might be considered by some people as a win for Joe Biden and so they turned on their own project Joe Biden is now taking those most owner constrictions and is trying to implement them as an executive order hilarious from my point of view now this is obviously unconstitutional because immigration is clearly a congressional prerogative whether or not it’s going to be challenged in court I don’t know but I can tell you it’s not going to work because all it would do if you remove the Asylum path is people go back to the illegal cross with a a ladder path neither of these are good at regulating immigration at all and as long as we’re flipping back and forth between those two solutions we’re not going to make this any better so let’s move beyond the ideology and talk about the reality number one the United States has the greatest labor shortage in its modern history and it’s only going to get worse for the next 22 years two million people came in illegally last year if they hadn’t we would probably have 9 to 10% inflation already so from an economic point of view it’s pretty clear where I stand second most of the people coming in are no longer Mexican Mexico 35 years ago started operationalizing NAFTA and they started industrializing and they started urbanizing and the birth rate has dropped by 2third inward migration from Mexico has been flat to negative for 15 [Music] years almost all of the migrants that have come in in the last five years are Honduran Nicaraguan El Salvadorian although there’s a sprinkling and a diverse array of people who have come in in the last two years but still mostly those three they have a demographic structure that looks very similar to Mexico’s just about five years younger because they got a free trade agreement with the United States in the year 2000 so that’s also unlimited time third that’s amlo he’s the Mexican president right now and he just basically appointed his successor who won in a landslide he’s not a smart man he basically combines the um the prickliness of Donald Trump with the ego of Hillary Clinton and he’s responsible for the cartels running rampant in country I mean that’s not fair half of it is is our love of cocaine so don’t do cocaine the other half is him insisting that there’s not a problem anywh who he doesn’t want to cooperate with the United States on anything but migration provides an inn because Mexico is no longer a source of migrants to the United States in fact Mexico is now a destination country for the first time and that has changed the conversation so I would argue we have a choice between one of two ways forward number one we try to go with the wall strategy but instead of building a wall we do it with amlo because he hates the migrants more than we do and while a single wall won’t work if you think of Mexico as a 2,000 mile long wall that’s a very different proposition that’s solution number one solution number two is something we’ve already done back in the 70s a series of hurricanes devastated Central America wiped out the fields destroyed the homes and a half a million people just started walking North because if they had stayed they would have died the Carter administration of all people sent ins down and just started handing out three-year worker permits to anyone who wanted one you come to the United States you register you pay your taxes keep your nose clean at the end of three years you have a choice option one get a flight home option two pay for a one-year renewal option three start the path to citizenship it worked hard to imagine that working in today’s political climate but in an environment of Labor shortages we do have a resource that is knocking at the door the alternative turn Mexico into a wall both of the these are viable options okay