The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - A Flawed Trade System in Europe || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

European efforts to build trade systems that exclude the U.S. are inherently flawed. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/413Yzpe

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Hey everybody, Peter Zion here, coming from Colorado. This is Pandora, the other cat. She's a little louder when it's meal time. Anyway, on the topic of things that are loud and annoying and sometimes take forever to do anything, let's talk about trade deals with the European Union because, wow, those are a shit show. So the big news is that in Europe, they're trying to come up with non-U.S. alternatives to the international order. This faces three really big problems. First of all, there is no international trade without the U.S. Navy.

The Europeans absolutely do not have the capacity to project naval power very far past their own front yard. So if they want to trade with Turkey or Russia or North Africa, sure. But anything beyond that, they really do need the security of the U.S. Navy grant. So let's just put that to the side. Number two, the Europeans are aggressively protectionist, when it comes to agriculture and most trade deals that have been negotiated in the last 30 years have found a way to kind of leave that out of the equation, which is a way of saying that they really haven't negotiated many trade deals in the last 30 years, which brings us to

the track record. The Europeans are so technical and so detail-oriented and so emotional about the details and then there's a ratification process that we'll get into here in a minute, that they can't do anything quickly. So for example, We now have a trade deal that has been negotiated with the Australians, and that was done in record time, less than a year. That's really, really good. But the ratification process is a whole different question. So the deal that was recently ratified with the Brazilians, the Argentinians, the Mercosur block, that was negotiated back around the year 2001, and they only now finished it. We had a Canada free trade agreement that was negotiated in the early 2010s.

That took 11 years to get through. The issue is not only does the European Union have to sign seal and deliver the treaty, each of the member governments then has to sign off. And some of those member governments require plebiscites. Some of them require regional legislatures signing off. In the case of Canada, it was Belgium was the real sticker. And we're going to have something similar here now for the Australian deal because it's very heavy on, as you might guess, agriculture.

Australia is a massive agricultural producer and exporter. and they have insisted reasonably that any trade deal that is going to access their raw materials also has to allow access for their trade goods, whether it's beef or lamb or wheat or whatnot. And we already have farmers across the European Union, including the trade associations, and of course the French saying that this deal has no chance of getting ratified. So if in the ideal situation everyone ultimately lines up and teas are crossed and eyes are dotted and knows as it's accounted and it goes through, we can look forward to the first large-scale transfer

of Australian goods to the European market in the year 2040. I am not going to be doing this long enough for that to matter.