Making Sense with Sam Harris - #355 — A Falling World

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Peter Zeihan about the unraveling world order. They discuss the Bretton Woods system, America’s role in securing the global supply chain, the coming end of American security guarantees, the shrinking of the US Navy, Houthi terrorism, deterring Iran, conflict in the Middle East, the future of Israel, the limits of immigration, the demographic pyramid, the demise of Europe, the war in Ukraine, the prospect of nuclear war, demographic collapse in China, loose nukes, America’s relative immunity to the world’s chaos, U.S. debt, the U.S. Southern border and immigration policy, why Trump will not win the 2024 election, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay. Well, a little housekeeping. We see the full lunacy of the Republican Party on display. Isolationist, willing to abdicate U.S. leadership globally, unconcerned that they now have a candidate who openly supports dictators in wars of aggression, who said that he would encourage Putin to do whatever the hell he wants to our NATO allies if they don't spend enough on their own defense because they're, quote, delinquent in their payments, as though the defense of Western

civilization has all the significance of a rental dispute over a condominium in Florida. It would be one thing to argue for American isolationism and to reconsider our involvement in foreign conflicts. I do think it would be easy to take the other side of that argument and to make the case that pulling back from the world, that is failing to defend democracies against aggressive autocracies, failing to defend our traditional allies, losing NATO, etc., I think it would be easy to argue that all of that would be very bad, not just for the world, but for American security eventually. But what we see on the right is not merely an America-first agenda. We see a totally amoral, and in many cases immoral, fondness for

dictators, and for Putin in particular, and for the total eclipse of liberal values, for the outright destruction of liberal institutions. We see fellow travelers and useful idiots propagandizing for autocracy. And speaking of idiots, useful or otherwise, we have Tucker Carlson, this well-established liar and fabulist and crackpot, broadcasting his smug ignorance from Mother Russia, to the delight of Putin, obviously, and of the populist right in America, but insanely also to the delight of some of the most prominent podcasters and tech bros who are not themselves right-wing idiots at all. I won't name names, but Jesus Christ. These people are acting as though just sticking a microphone in front of Putin for two hours and looking servile was a heroic act of investigative journalism.

and looking servile was a heroic act of investigative journalism. Now, of course, many people have savaged Tucker, and in particular responded to his delusional comments about how much better life is in Moscow than in any American city. Fareed Zakaria had a great response on his show, and in the Washington Post, John Stewart did his bit. And this would all be hilarious because it's so ludicrous if so many people weren't taken in by it. Needless to say, Trump's and Tucker's and the right wing's embrace of Putin looks even more vile in light of the recent death of Alexei Navalny. In Putin, we're talking about

a leader who imprisons and murders his political opponents. He even murders his critics in foreign capitals, like London. He imprisons and murders journalists. He even imprisons American journalists and even Russian billionaires. I mean, how did we get to the point that something like half of America can't see what's wrong with this? that something like half of America can't see what's wrong with this. Anyway, I'm going to do a podcast on the war in Ukraine soon with someone who actually knows something about it, and no doubt there will be more to say about Russia and Putin at that point. I have a book recommendation to make. A book just came out in the U.S. I think it came out in the U.K. maybe a year earlier.

in the U.S. I think it came out in the U.K. maybe a year earlier. The title is The Holocaust, An Unfinished History by Dan Stone. A very readable book, and the audio is actually quite good. No matter how much you imagine you know about the Holocaust, revisiting it is always astonishing, and this is a particularly good window onto it. We actually invited Dan on the podcast, and he declined. I think he said he had done enough podcasts. I don't see the evidence of him having done enough podcasts, frankly. Perhaps I'm missing something. But it almost never happens that someone declines. I think I can still count on one hand the number of times someone has said no to appearing on the podcast, so it doesn't happen much. If any of you are friends of Dan's or colleagues and you think we would have a good conversation, you might ask him to reconsider. I think we'd have a great

conversation, and I love his book. Whether he ever comes on the podcast or not, I recommend you all go out and buy it and read it at this moment, because I'm really enjoying it, if enjoying is the right word. It's quite good. In today's podcast, the question and perhaps inevitability of American isolationism does come up, because today I'm speaking with Peter Zion. Peter is a geopolitical strategist and a global energy demographic and security expert. He is the author of several books, but he has re-released his first, The Accidental Superpower, and updated it, which is the focus of today's conversation. on the podcast, I brought Ian Bremmer on with me to essentially backstop my ignorance of a lot of these issues and to help me get the most out of Peter. This time I flew the plane myself, and you can be the judge of whether or not I landed the thing safely or whether there should

now be crosses and bouquets of flowers strewn along the tarmac. I must say, Peter is so confident in his prognostications that I find it a little disconcerting, both because so much of what he predicts is scary, but also his confidence worries me a little too. You know, I push back in certain places or at least ask him to consider counterfactuals. So make of my contributions to this conversation what you will. I think Peter is fascinating to listen to. Some of his predictions are relatively near-term, which is fun. For instance, he thinks there is no way that Trump will win in November. We'll see the results of that soon enough. And many of his most dire predictions for the fate of Europe and China and elsewhere, these are not many, many decades out. He's thinking in terms of

10 and 15 years for a lot of this stuff. So anyway, very interesting, extraordinarily bleak. And yet the picture for America is pretty rosy. That is, if we survive the nuclear war that he thinks is probably coming, but more of that soon. Anyway, we speak about the unraveling world order. We discuss the Bretton Woods system, America's role in securing the global supply chain, the coming end of these security guarantees, the shrinking of the U.S. Navy, Houthi terrorism in the Red Sea, deterring Iran, conflict in the Middle East, the future of Israel, the limits of immigration, the demographic pyramid, the coming demise of Europe, the war in Ukraine, the prospect of nuclear war, demographic collapse in China,

the threat of loose nukes in Russia, America's relative immunity to the world's chaos, U.S. debt, the southern border and immigration policy, why Trump will not win the 2024 election, and other topics. And now I bring you the fascinating Peter Zion. I am here with Peter Zion. Peter, thanks for joining me again. Great to be back. So since we last spoke, we spoke in our first conversation about your book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning. And since then, you have reissued your first book, or at least it was your first book that I'm aware of, The Accidental Superpower. And you reissued it 10 years on, updating your predictions and analysis. So we'll focus on that. And I just, to remind people, you seem to argue,

at least in the two books I've read and in much of the other material I've seen from you, that some combination of geography and demography is destiny, right? Which is, I must say, very counterintuitive to those of us who tend to think in terms of the power of ideas, right? So your analysis tends to suggest that you can have whatever ideas you want, but if you live in a malarial swamp without navigable waterways, you're basically screwed. There's only so much you can do with an idea in that situation. Yeah. So yeah, feel free to correct any misapprehension I might have with your general take on things, but that's the general lesson I tend to draw, and I just want to get into all the details. is kind of a waning of the Pax Americana that we've all taken for granted, modulo a few hiccups, like a few wars that we think better of now. But there's this new populist desire for

isolationism, and this is emerging at a time where there's this seemingly new authoritarian axis emerging with China and Russia and Iran and North Korea. Perhaps there are others that should be put in there. And many people in America seem to want our country to become some version of a nuclear-armed Switzerland, where we just stay out of the world's conflicts. And you seem to be arguing that that's going to happen whether people want it or not. Populism and Trumpism might be pushing it, but there are geopolitical changes that are just going to make it happen anyway. And you also have a very optimistic take for how America lands in all of this. So I want to save America for the end, but obviously

it's going to come up again and again as you analyze the rest of the world. But I thought we could probably start, as you do in your book, with the Bretton Woods Agreement, and you can remind people what that was and what its consequences were, and then we could just track through various regions landing with the US and North America. That works for me. Nice. So Bretton Woods, what was it, and what were its consequences? When most people think of Bretton Woods, they're thinking of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank and the idea of a new financial architecture in the aftermath of World War II. And it was all of that and more. But the core issue was this

concept that the United States military would go out and make the global oceans safe for anyone's commerce, no matter who you were, no matter what you did, no matter where you were selling, no matter who you were partnering with, anyone could go anywhere. And that was a fundamental change in the international environment because it allowed countries that honestly had lost the war and lost badly to emerge from the wreckage with trade access as if they were the world's most powerful empire and could get anywhere at any time. Now, there was a catch there. For the Americans to do this for you, you had to sign up to be on our side during the Cold War. That provided us with the alliance network that we needed to contain and ultimately beat back the Soviet Union. Another characteristic of this structure was that

the United States would not invest its economy in this new international network because if it had done that, it would have just been another conquering empire. We got this global structure where the United States did the heavy lifting on a security front and allowed this parallel economic structure to happen on a global basis of which the Americans were at most side participants in. It's not that we didn't play at all, but as a percentage of GDP, we remain the least involved economy in the world, especially if you factor out the NAFTA countries modern day. In terms of total import-export, we are looking at something that's less than 5% of GDP, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what it is for most other countries. I don't think that's widely appreciated.

I think that's – in fact, I was fairly surprised to hear that we don't export all that much. Well, the numbers are going to be different based on who's doing the data because different people weight different things differently and don't even count certain things. And when you're talking about money and manufacturing, which is where there's thousands of supply chain steps, getting good data is difficult at best. But pretty much everybody's data says that somewhere between 10 and 20% of US GDP is involved in imports and exports in some way. But roughly half of that is the NAFTA network. And roughly a third of what's left is US energy and energy product exports. And so if you pull those out, you're talking 5% of GDP is all that's left.

pull those out, you're talking 5% of GDP is all that's left. All right. Well, we'll get to island America eventually. So you're saying that we basically have policed world trade without being ourselves nearly as dependent upon it as the countries we've been helping police. Right. So if you go up until 1992, because that's where we have a bit of a split in policy and decision-making. Up until that point, pretty much all of our involvement in the Middle East wasn't about getting crude out of the region for us. It was about getting crude out of the region for our allies, because the North American market for energy has largely been self-contained since the beginning. Remember that we were one of the major exporters during World War II that allowed the Europeans and even the Russians to fight. And that generated a very

different economic model because we experienced things like the oil shocks in the 70s because oil prices are internationally linked. It is a broadly fungible and liquid commodity financially. But we were never in danger of an actual shortage. It was a price issue here. The shortage was an Eastern Hemispheric problem. It was a problem for Japan. It was a problem for Germany. And that's why we were involved because the idea was if the United States does not rise to the occasion and contain instability in the Middle East, then the allies would no longer have an economic interest in partnering with the United States on security affairs. And for us, that was the only thing

that mattered. And that's the reason why Iran, once it turned fundamentalist in 1979, was always an issue because Iran always had that threat over the Persian Gulf energy exports. And if that went away, the alliance could theoretically go away. And so even now, 40 years later, when the United States is more and more populist and is less interested in maintaining all of this for any number of reasons, mostly domestic politics, we still get this knee-jerk reaction to anything that happens against Iran because we have been so exposed. That has always been the raw nerve. In many ways, Iran has always been the country on the planet that had the greatest capacity to disrupt our overall security plans. Now, I would argue that's no longer the

case. We've moved on. But the emotional inertia there is immense, and we're certainly seeing that in political decisions today. So how and why is Bretton Woods coming to an end? Oh, you have to go back to the fact that we won the Cold War. After 1992, we started to have a conversation with ourselves about what's Bretton Woods to? How do we take this alliance, the greatest alliance in human history, and play it forward for another generation or two of American pyramids? How do we remake the human condition? How do we spread free market capitalism? How do we improve the rates of human rights? How do we push women's rights? How do we make the world a better place that we can then leave to our descendants? And the person who tried to get

us to have that conversation was George Herbert Walker Bush, and Americans decided that they didn't want to have that conversation. And instead, we went with Bill Clinton, who was much more focused on North America, much more populist and narcissistic. And from there, we went to W. Bush, and from there to Obama, and Obama to Trump, and Trump to Biden. And we've just kind of taken steps down that road, despite the variety of policies and personalities that we have seen since 1992, what they all have in common is each one is a little bit more economically nationalist than the one that came before. So from an economic and political point of view, we've moved away from this structure. And while that's happened, we've also changed our military, specifically the Navy, into a form that I would argue is no longer even capable of maintaining the globalized network.

We used to have a 600-ship Navy dominated by small vessels that could be almost everywhere at once. And so the idea of keeping the sea lanes open against threats was a viable policy. But since 1992, we've steadily reduced the size of the fleet while steadily increasing its tonnage. And so instead of having 600 ships that are mostly small, we now have about 250 ships that are centered around the aircraft carrier battle groups, of which we now have 12 supercarriers and 10 jump carriers. And it's really hard for us to function independently of that anymore. Now, if you want to carry out a military operation and knock over a country, you have the right tools for the job. But if you want to throw a wide net and provide naval security everywhere, we no longer have the numbers or the types of ships that are necessary. So look at what's going on in the Red

Sea right now with the Houthis taking potshots at shipping. It is stressing us to the brink of keeping the Red Sea open because we no longer have enough vessels of the type that could do this. And this is arguably, the Houthis are arguably the worst terrorists in the world operating from the most worthless chunk of land. And if we had a second event like this anywhere in the world, I the most worthless chunk of land. And if we had a second event like this anywhere in the world, I doubt the US Navy could rise to the occasion. So this is pushing us to the very brink of what is possible with our current military posture. And if it fails, the United States is not the country that's going to feel the pain.

The country that's going to feel the most pain by far is going to be China because they're the most dependent on open seas. Which they don't police, despite the fact that the South China Sea is a mess. Even if they wanted to police, they don't have the ships with the range to get there. Right, right. Just maybe a little detour here. What do you think we should do about the Houthis? Well, like I said, they're the most incompetent terrorists in the world operating from the most worthless land. The only reason at all, in my opinion, that the Houthis matter is because everyone's supposed to take shots at the Saudi oil complex. But over the last 10 years, the Saudis have put up nets and jammers, which have pretty much reduced the damage to zero. So I am

going to go with a big fat don't really care. But how do you operationalize don't really care when ships can't navigate those waters and they're crucial for oil and much else? Yeah. I mean, here's the problem. It's not just politics that is driving the United States away from the system. I'd argue between demographic changes, economic reality, the Chinese rise, changes, economic reality, the Chinese rise, and the shift in the American naval posture, that we can't do it anymore. We're going to have to do something Americans really hate doing. We're going to have to make some choices about what we want to protect and what we want to further. And it's really hard for me to see Yemen being part of that conversation. Well, I guess now that I've

wandered off course here, let's bring Iran into this conversation. Isn't it really Iran that needs to be successfully deterred here? I mean, the Houthis are widely understood to be one of their proxies. And what do you make of the fact that the massive asymmetry in power between the US and Iran doesn't seem to offer much effective deterrence. I mean, Iran seems to do what it wants more or less with impunity, at least up until this point. What should we do and why are we- We can get into all kinds of trouble with this conversation. Okay. Let's start with the situation on the ground and then we can look at American American policy. In the aftermath of the Iraq War, the biggest thing the United States did was remove the single largest regional check on Iran's power and expansion, and that was the government

of Saddam Hussein of Iraq. But just by destroying that, and then the way we chose to attempt rebuilding and restructuring in a post-Ba'ath environment, which we did not manage very well, we fully shattered what had been the Mesopotamian check on Persian expansion that had existed for most of the last millennia. In doing so, Iran was able to shove power into southern Iraq, into its Shia zones, and then beyond into places like Jordan and especially Syria and Lebanon. And in doing that, what they usually did is they worked with whatever sectarian group did not hold the whip, the ones that were not in charge, and empowered them to fight back against the ruling order of their zone.

And in doing so, basically half burned the entire region down. Now, I don't mean to suggest this was just them, the Saudis got in on it too. And the Saudis did it from the majority position, usually working with Sunni Arab fundamentalists and militants to attack things. So you had elements on both extremes that weren't so much attacking the center, but attacking what passed for the rule of law and what passed for stability of the region. And so all of these states faced a massive degradation in their capacity to function as states. Now, the United States has largely disengaged itself from the region, but where we still have forces in play, it's to fight one specific group, the Islamic State or ISIS or

whatever you want to call it, which is to be perfectly blunt, the child of our ally, Saudi Arabia, as opposed to the Iranians. But the decision has been made by the Trump administration and then doubled down on by the Biden administration that we should keep combat to a minimum and just focus on training and intelligence cooperation with other forces in the region to carry out most of the work. What that means effectively is that American forces that are in the region don't leave their bases very often. If you're an Iranian and you're looking for a very, very, very easy propaganda win, you launch a mortar, you send off a rocket or a drone, you take a pot shot, and even if you

hit nothing, it makes a nice little splash of PR that you can use for recruiting wherever you want to operate. You put that against the backdrop of the Gaza war, and of course, hundreds of attacks are going to go against American positions because we're not shooting back because that is not the order. The Iranian militants, despite how much we don't much care for them, we have decided in Washington that ISIS is the bigger threat. And so we didn't shoot back until one of the drones actually got through. And it's forcing the Biden administration to reevaluate the entire policy set of this entire region, not just vis-a-vis the Iranian-backed militias, but why

we have a footprint there at all. If the decision comes down, which I think it will in the next year, that there's not really much that we're doing that is useful in this region at all on the ground, then when you pull those forces out, then you have to take another look at what you're going to do on the seas. So there is a long overdue policy reckoning that has now started in Washington. And it's unclear to me at this moment, just how far back we're going to pull out, but everything is on the table. And we probably should have had these conversations 15 years ago, but you know, better late than never. I still am kind of mystified by the failure of deterrence, because wouldn't it be trivially easy for us to just destroy Iran's ports, right? And just basically- Oh, sure. Yeah, no. There's kind of three ways that the United States could fight back. Number

one is just go for a bit of a tit for tat against the militias themselves, whether they're the Houthis or one of these various Hezbollah outcrops anywhere in Jordan or Lebanon, Iraq or Lebanon, or sorry, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, or Iraq. Number two would be to go after Iranian shipping because most of the weapon systems that are going to places like the Houthis have to go by the water. It's not like they're smuggling these things on land through Saudi Arabia. So you do a kind of a de facto embargo on vessels that are coming out of Iranian ports, especially once they leave the port of Hormuz. And then step three would be to go after their physical assets in the Persian Gulf. Going after their quote naval bases won't really do much because most of the Iranian Navy is literally speedboats.

So I'm not suggesting that would be hard to take off. I'm just saying that doesn't really move the needle in any meaningful way. You're certainly not going to do an assassination program on the mainland because there's just too many people. This isn't China where it's a one-man show or Russia where the entire elite's under 140 people. This is a full-on theocracy with literally over 10,000 people in the political elite. There's no assassination program that would make any sense there or have an end.

But you could destroy their oil industry very easily because it's pretty much all shipped out via one port on Karg Island. Karg Island doesn't even have a bridge connecting it to the mainland. If you destroy the facilities on either side of the strait that separates Karg from the mainland, Iranian exports would effectively go down to zero and not come back for years. Two questions. Why haven't we done that? Because we have still not carried out our full assessment of what we want to do in the post-Bretton Woods system. If the United States, who at least officially today is the guarantor of global naval security, even if it's failing at that role and edging away from it, if we actually go out and attack maritime shipping and energy supplies, that closes off a lot of options in a lot of places. Now, I think in time, we're going to get there anyway. But like I said, we probably should have had a policy reassessment in this region 15 years ago. This is part of that. Yeah. Well, so accepting that rationale,

why is it that you think Iran is not deterred by the prospect of our doing that? Why are they being as provocative as they are, given how vulnerable they are? There's a general belief in Iran that the United States has no interest in giving up its global cop role. And as long as that is the case, the more you needle the United States, the more likely they are to come to the table. Now, I personally think that is a miscalculation on their part, but that is the dominant view of most of the folks who think strategically within the country. There's this misunderstanding. It's kind of funny. Iranian foreign policy now for 30 years has been about basically backing the little guy

to oppose the Arab and the secular and the American-backed governments throughout the region. In many cases, the Iranians have gotten exactly what they wanted, but now that the dog has caught the car, they're discovering that this region can't be governed because they've destroyed most of the poles of power and stability throughout the region. There's no one to co-opt. They've really, really, really pissed off most of the Sunnis and most of the Arabs. They've indirectly in their victories and their successes and in their exploitation of the Iraq war created exactly the sort of environment that is encouraging all the other regional governments to band together against them. And the Abraham Accords is part of that.

So this is what happens in the Middle East when you get what you want. And it's a pretty ugly picture. And they're honestly not sure what they can get next. The reason that they are still in play in such a big way is because they've discovered that their population is actually sufficiently okay with the level of economic isolation and recession that it doesn't inhibit the theocracy's ability to rule. As long as they believe that, they will keep pushing.

Okay, so let's widen the picture to the rest of the Middle East. Generally speaking, once again, you seem to blame economic geography for most, if not all, of the dysfunction in the region. I'm wondering how you interpret the success, notwithstanding the security concerns of Israel in that context. Well, the region overall, whenever you've got an area that's dry to desert, it's hard to have basic agriculture. And if you don't have agriculture, you never get small businesses and you never move up into, say, manufacturing and industry. And so this region has always been left behind. The places where that is least true are the places where it rains. And that is Turkey,

and that is Tunisia, and to a lesser degree, Morocco, which are the three most economically advanced states in the region by any measure. The Israelis are unique in many, many, many ways, mostly because when the Jews were brought back in the post-World War II environment, they brought a lot of skill sets that they had developed elsewhere over centuries with them and a lot of capital in addition to the strategic sponsorship of the West in general, the United States in particular. That gave the Israelis access to trade options that no one else in the region had, but they also started working with skill sets that no one else in the region had. That's allowed them to build up a sets that no one else in the region had.

That's allowed them to build up a bit of a technocracy in a region that is known for anything, but you got this weird little pocket of service economy and high-tech manufacturing in a sea of something else. It is because of the people, not because of their ethnicity, but because you've had a few million people who now call themselves Israelis who for generations lived somewhere else. It's a full-on graft. And it's part of the reason why North America and Australia are just so different from Europe. They took the skill sets that they originated in another place and applied them to Indian geography and made something new,

for better or for worse. Now, maintaining the security of a little statelet like that under normal circumstances is impossible because this region, the Levant specifically, has never been powerful enough to look after itself. It's never had the population density to generate a military force that can keep things at bay. it's always been at the whim of greater powers, whether those powers be the Turks or the Persians or once even the Mongols. That, countering that, the forces of history and just the sheer demographic overbalance of the tiny size of Israel versus the huge heft of these other players requires a lot of really creative thinking. And what the Israelis have done, sometimes in league with outside powers, sometimes not, is one after another,

turn the countries that border them either into allies like Egypt, into security proxies like Jordan, basically has become a dependency, or break them in the case of Lebanon basically becoming a failed state, and I'd argue Syria is pretty close to that as well. It doesn't solve the broader problem of a partnership with those larger outside powers to prevent invasion, but it does give whoever is going to cross in from elsewhere the fact that they have to cross through these other areas first. So let's assume, for example, that the last country that occupied what is today Israel, Turkey, decided it wanted to come back. Well, first it would have to absorb Lebanon and Syria, and there's no one in Turkey who thinks that would be a lot of fun. So it's kind of a firebreak strategy. I don't want to suggest that

it's going to work forever, but it's working for now. that it's going to work forever, but it's working for now. What are your expectations for the future of Israel, given the durability of the hatred of the surrounding Islamic cultures to varying degrees? What are their prospects from a security point of view? There's the partnership angle, and then there's the internal angle. The partnership angle is well underway. And if it hadn't been for the Gaza war, we would probably already have a formal peace deal between the Israelis and the Saudis. Now, they have been cooperating fairly tightly for 15 years now.

There's a lot of Israeli forces that basically train the Saudis on their own equipment. There's a lot of intelligence cooperation on both sides, especially vis-a-vis Iran. I'm not suggesting that they agree on everything, but whenever the Americans have put official or unofficial sanctions on either country for human rights abuses, they turn to one another in order to play the United States off of whatever the issue happens to be and then provide direct assistance to the other one in order to get what they want anyway. It's been a fairly successful model so far because the Americans have not called them on it. They've had a de facto alliance, I would argue, for at least a decade. The question that has been up in recent months is whether just to make that formal.

There's a generational split within Saudi Arabia about whether they should go formal and get something for the Palestinians as part of it, or just throw the Palestinians under the bus and make it official. And that is a conversation that is very much in play. So in terms of a security guarantor, Saudi Arabia can't play that role. But if the Israelis can flip Saudi Arabia to formally being on the same side as Egypt and Jordan and Morocco, and at least neutral like Turkey is, then you really don't have to worry about the Arab side of the external security threats. And that would be a significant victory. And I think that is now within reach. And I think we're definitely going to see that this decade. The Iranian problem isn't going away, but it's distant. And no one is thinking

that there's about to be another Persian empire that's going to expand out and occupy the entire region. The Iranians are too technologically inept at the moment to pull anything like that off. So that's a problem for a different century. The internal problem, I think, is going to be more of an issue. The success of Israel owes more to itself than it does to American sponsorship. It is because you've got this highly educated population that has carved a little bit green out of the desert, that's made them a high value add, that's made out of the desert, that's made them high value ad, that's made their intelligence systems great, that's made their weapon systems among the world's best. But at the same time, they've created this space within their own political and economic

system for a class of people who reject everything about modern life and basically study religious texts all day and have a bunch of kids and live on state subsidies. And that's like 30 to 40% of the population now. And so you've got this, this is going to sound incredibly jaded, but a near deadbeat population who is sucking at the teat of the government and sucking the government dry and yet all voting together in a relatively anti-economic, anti-Arab, anti-peace, anti-cooperation, anti-military block. And they're just, the leaders that get put in from this population are absolutely incompetent. Yet they claim that they represent the true soul of the people. And they claim that they're the

security hawks. And they claim they know more about how to run the military than the generals. And their incompetence is in many ways what led to the surprise of last October and November when Hamas made their move. These were the people who were in charge of those institutions, and they ignored all the warnings that were coming up from the professionals who had been in their jobs for decades, and they did so for political reasons. Well, you'll get no defense of the ultra-Orthodox from me, as you might imagine. Let's move to Europe. You're extraordinarily bearish on Europe. What's the landscape look like there? So three big problems. Number one,

this is a region that has gotten most of its energy from the Russian space. So that's a problem, especially since that's obviously their number one security threat. They're in the process of trying to wrestle with that right now from a late start. Number two, this is part of the world that industrialized and urbanized very intensely after World War II. After 70 years, their birth rates have now been so low for so long that Germany and Italy and their birth rates have now been so low for so long that Germany and Italy and well, those two, those are the big ones, will cease to function as modern economic entities within 10 or 15 years. Because it's not that they ran out of children. That happened 30 years ago. They're running out of working age adults this decade. And there is no economic model that works there. And then number

three- Immigration isn't the solution to that? The problem there is scale. So take Germany, a country with a little over 80 million people, is no economic model that works there. And then number three- Immigration isn't the solution to that? The problem there is scale. So like take Germany, a country with a little over 80 million people, for them just to hold the line where they are right now, they would need to import 2 million people under age 25 every year for the next 20 years, just to hold the line of where they are now. And that would mean in 20 years, the Germans would be a small minority within their own country. It's not viable. If you want immigration to be part of the solution, you start early, you make it a trickle, you never let up, and you have to consign yourself to a degree of cultural change. If the longer you wait, the more you need to bring in, the sharper the change will be. And for the European nation states, I just don't think it's a viable option,

or at least not at scale. There may be some individual exceptions here and there, and there now are a lot of Ukrainians that are looking to settle in a new place. But if all of the Ukrainians who have left, that's like a quarter of the population of Ukraine is left for Europe. If they all settled in Germany, that's still not enough. Immigration as a lever requires a lot of early action. What that means is you've got an entire continent that is aging towards obsolescence. They no longer have enough people who are young to perpetuate the populations, but that also means they don't have enough people who are young to do the consuming of the economic outputs, which means the third problem that Germany, Europe in general is an export-led economic system and not only works as long as someone is willing to absorb those exports. The United States is turning more nationalist and populist

and it's shrinking what's available. And the Chinese system, even if it survives, which I'm sure we can talk about that next, no longer has a lot of young people either. So most of the exports to China have been in the form of industrial plant to help the Chinese export to yet more countries. It's a bit of a daisy chain that even if you remove issues of ethics and morals and solidarity in Ukraine and Russia from, still is a bit of a starvation diet because there just aren't enough countries with young populations to absorb this

volume of advanced age economies exports beyond the end of this decade. So it's a model that is very clearly dying by any number of means, even if the United States decides it still wants to partnership with Europe. And it's not clear that that is the case for the long term. If you look at what's happening with the Biden administration vis-a-vis the Europeans on the topic of Ukraine, every single deal has been about security. Trade hasn't been brought up once. There is no stomach in the Biden White House to push towards any sort of trade arrangement with the Europeans that will buy them more time. Is there any scenario where technology comes to the rescue or is this just science fiction? I mean, just imagine perfect robots that fill in for

any shortage of human labor in the relevant cohort. Sure. So there's two big problems if you want to look to, say, automation to solve these problems. Number one is that automation is very expensive, and it's more expensive to maintain it than it is to install it. So it's a cost that builds as you go. And as people move into mass retirement, their ability to generate capital to fund this sort of thing declines. So if you can't front load it, it's probably not going to happen. And then second, let's say you can figure it out. You can automate everything. Okay. Well, that may address the production side of the equation, but Europe's problem hasn't been

production. It's been consumption and robots, at least yet, don't consume. Don't buy things. We can fix that. Actually, take a moment to review the demographic pyramid and sketch, as you just began to, the responsibilities of the different age brackets in terms of how they contribute to the economy, to production, consumption, investment, et cetera? Sure. So in a quote, normal, unquote system, especially before World War II, you had a pyramid structure. You had very few retirees, and then slightly more mature workers, people in their 40s, 50s, and early 60s. And below that, even more young workers in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s, and below that, lots and lots and lots of children. It's a traditional pre-industrial demographic structure because it's all about having lots of free kids because they're free labor on the farm.

But as globalization kicked in, we all started to specialize because all of a sudden, we were all part of one extended network. And specialization meant services and manufacturing jobs, and all of those were in town. So we started moving into the cities, and in cities, kids are no longer free labor. They're an expense. And you fast forward 70 years, and adults just had fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer of them. And after 70 years, the pyramid has shifted. At first, it was just you had fewer children and then fewer young adults, and it kind of became a chimney. That gave us this absolutely magical growth structure, especially in the West, especially in East Asia from the 60s and the 70s up until almost now,

because you had a lot of people who were aged 20 to 65, but very few retirees and very few children. So all of the investment, all of the tax base, which was huge, could be spent on infrastructure and technology and education. And we got the fastest economic growth that we have ever seen as a species. And it moved around, but more or less lasted for 70 years. Well, you can only do that once. You can only urbanize once, and you can only benefit from that perfect demographic moment once. What's happening now is there have been so few kids born for so long that most of the advanced economies, and this includes Germany and Italy and Japan and China, it's not that they've run out of kids or teenagers

or 20-somethings or 30-somethings. They're not or teenagers or 20-somethings or 30-somethings. They're now running out of 40-somethings and 50-somethings. We have this massive inversion. It looks like a top with the wide spot now approaching mass retirement. What happens this decade is that wide spot moves past retirement. We get to a situation where it's not where we have more retirees than children. We passed that a while ago. It's we have more retirees than we have children and young adults put together. We have no idea what that will mean for our normal economic models of fascism and socialism and capitalism because those are all based on growth, based on population. That is now impossible for most of the largest economies of the world. In the case of the United

States, it's a bit of an exception. We're still in that chimney stage and our birth rate hasn't dropped enough to condemn us to that future. If we keep aging at the rate we're doing now, we won't be in a German style situation until about 2070. Hopefully, that's a lot of time to figure out a new path or at least worst case scenario, we get to see how the Germans and the Chinese and the Japanese and the Koreans and everyone else deals with this devolution. And hopefully we'll learn a few things about what to do or even just what not to do. What happens or what do you expect to happen when the largest cohort of retirees dies off? I guess the baby boomers, when they age out of existence,

what does that do to the economy? You have to look, I mean, if that's a cultural question as much as anything. So you've got your American boomers and then your global boomers. They were formed at roughly the same time by roughly the same reason. The post-World War II euphoria when the GIs came home, they had a bunch of kids, those are the boomers. That happened even in the Soviet Union. The difference between the United States and most of the rest of the world is that our boomers had a lot of kids, and we know those as the millennials. We do have an eco-boomer generation, and that's a big part of why our demographic decline has been so much slower, but that didn't happen almost anywhere else. When the boomers die everywhere

else, they probably will have already absorbed all of the accrued capital from their lifetimes and pensions and healthcare because they won't be paying taxes in the same volume anymore, and that'll bankrupt the states. There's no longer a replacement generation down below to replenish the population. You're looking at aging populations, denigrating populations, less investment capacity because there's never the capital generation to exist in the first place now. In the United States, that's not necessarily true. I firmly believe that America's boomers aren't going to pass a lot of money on onto their kids because they're going to spend it on themselves. But we still have that younger generation coming up. The older boomers turn 45 years old this year. And that means in about 10 years, they're going to be entering their capital rich stage of their life.

Wait a minute. The older boomers- I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I said that wrong. The older millennials turn 45 this year. As a rule, from age 55 to 65 is when you're the most capital rich in your life. That's what everyone else in the world is losing. We just have a hiccup. As the boomers pass on, Gen X is small, but then the millennials will eventually catch up. I'm using air quotes here. All we have to do in the United States to get back to a better capital generation moment is wait 12 years until the millennials will be doing it. But there aren't a lot of other countries in the world that will ever reach that point.

France, New Zealand, Sweden, that's about it. So what exactly are you picturing when you say something like Germany is going to deindustrialize and basically unravel or not exist as a state, I forget the language you used, but it was starkly dystopian. What are you actually picturing? If we jumped in a time machine and went to the Germany of 2070, what are you expecting to see? I wouldn't expect to see a Germany in 2070. That's part of the problem here. Everything that we're studying demographically, this has never happened before,

never in human history. We've never seen this sort of decay, even in times of war and genocide, even in times of the Black Death. It's never happened. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Thank you. on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.