The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - America After the Election: Foreign Policy || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Listen, I debated even entertaining an election video for today, but since this question was so good, I just had to record one. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/america-after-the-election-foreign-policy

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado, where we are two-thirds of the way through our first 10 inches of snow for the season. Ooh. Happy election day to everyone. I had considered just letting this pass and just dealing with the crap that's going to inevitably happen after. But I got a really good question from one of the Patreon crowd members. So I figured I would take a shot at it before I leave the country for a couple days. So the question is this. What aspects of American foreign policy are going to be?

to stick with us regardless of who wins the presidential election. Great question. I do not have a great answer. In the world until roughly, oh, let's call it 2012, we had something in the United States when it came to foreign policy and strategic policy called the bipartisan consensus. And the idea was that the Soviet Union was bad, global communism was not a great idea, and the way for the United States to secure its security as well as its economic well-being was to build an alliance network that would span the world and pursue a free trade world, a globalized world with everyone, so that most countries of consequence would have a vested interest in benefiting from participating in the American security agreements rather than going

and doing something else. And that gave us NATO and the Japanese and the Korean and Taiwanese alliances and all of that and built the non-aligned world into an economic power. house that wasn't necessarily aligned with the United States, but really wasn't aligned with anyone else either. Broadly worked. But then in 2012, we had eight years of a visceral disinterest in governing by Barack Obama. And then we got Donald Trump and Joe Biden, who were two of the most economically populist presidents we've ever had. And over that 16-year period, the bipartisan consensus has withered away. And the party that was responsible for basically writing most of the real

policies. The Republican Party has now found itself in a different place with the national security conservatives and the business conservatives, not really even part of the party architecture any longer. And there are some factions of the Republican Party that are finding themselves very strangely aligned on some issues with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. So to say that security policy is no longer up for grabs in the United States is not paying attention to what's really going on. What that means is the United States is in a period of flux. not just politically internally, but internationally. Now, this is the topic of a lot of my workings,

starting with the absent superpower and the accidental superpower 10 years ago. But what we're seeing in the United States is also churning other things, which means that very few of the things that we consider to be normal national security and economic precepts are likely to survive because the institutions of the parties that formed them are themselves up for grabs. And we're seeing the leadership of both the Democratic and the Republican Party taking the institutions into a non-functional era. They will reform, and we will get to a sexuation where we can have a meaningful conversation

about foreign policy again, but it's probably not going to be for a few more years. So we're stuck with what we have. So let's start with the Democrats and Kamala Harris. How can I say this without sound like a complete prick? She's an empty suit. Kamala Harris, her only job experienced before she became vice president was being a prosecutor, which is, you know, better than the last three presidents, but it's still not a lot. It's a relatively myopic view of anything.

And so when you look at anything, she's going to say about anything, she's never actually implemented anything. And so you have to take everything with a big block assault. In her first year as vice president, she was at Joe Biden's side in every press conference, every summit, every meeting. And it got to the point that Biden's staff decided that, no, we don't want her around. so they gave her a task that they knew she would fail out and gave her no power to carry it out. And that was going down to solve the border.

And so lo and behold, it was a failure. And then they were able to shovel her off to the side for the next two and a half years until it turns out she's through the presidential nominee. So if you are voting for Kamala Harris, do not fool yourself. You are voting for an unknown, somebody with very limited experience and who will come into the White House without a circle of people around her who are competent. There are going to be people she's picked up people who are not loyal to her personally, most likely. And so it really is a crapshoot. And then, of course, we've got the Republican side. And I want to put aside for the moment most of my feelings on Donald Trump on strategic issues,

I would just ask you to look at really any of his interviews or rallies in the last three weeks, especially the one that was in Michigan two days ago. The degradation that I saw during the debate with Biden was in full swing. and this guy is just not all there anymore. So even if he does become president, he probably won't be for very long. Keep in mind that he is older now than Joe Biden was when Joe Biden became president.

And the mental fortitude that was required for the job is immense. And Trump just doesn't have it. So don't kid yourself if you're voting for Trump. You're actually voting for J.D. Vance. And J.D. Vance is even more of an empty suit than Kamala Harris. He's also a bit of a chameleon, which I don't know if this is a plus or a minus. He wrote a somewhat famous book, Hillbilly Illegie a few years ago, and since then he's partially repudiated what he said.

And then he said that Donald Trump was a horrible person, should never be president and was a danger to democracy. And he's obviously repudiated that. This is a guy who will say anything to get closer to power. And if Trump wins, he will be the next president. So we've got two candidates here who both seem to be fairly economically populace, both of which have no experience in the real world. And no experience in government, are very limited anyway. And that's what's on docket. So any sort of institutional loyalties are weak to none.

Any sort of policy experience that might give us an idea of what they might prioritize is negligible. And so any sort of policies that might have consistency from the last 20 years to the next four, it's going to be a short list. The issue with foreign policy in the United States is that most of it is a presidential prerogative. And it's very rare that Congress has any say in any of it, at least in the formative stages. And so if we don't know who, institutionally speaking, politically speaking, ethically speaking, the next president is going to be because there's no track record, we don't know what they're going to prioritize at all. And we don't know how they would react to any hypothetical scenario because they never had to do it before. The only policies that are an exception then are issues where the president has. chosen to seat a degree of authority to Congress and lock something in with an act of Congress

that limits the president's room to maneuver. Those sorts of policies will probably stick because we'd require an act of Congress to overthrow them. In the case of the United States, that's a very short list of things and most are related to trade, of which by far the most important policy that falls into that bucket is NAFTA. Now, I've made no bones about my general dislike of Donald Trump on any number of issues, but what he did with NAFTA II's rid of, negotiation, I thought was brilliant because it was the right thing and the right time with the right partner. Mexico has become our number one trade partner. And if there is a future for the United States economically outside of being locked into a very dangerous and unequal relationship with

China, Mexico will be the core of whatever that happens to be. And so having the hard work done already and having it be the isolationist right of the United States that did the negotiations, I thought was great. So no matter who becomes president next, I think NAFTA is fine. And honestly, that is the single most important foreign policy priority the United States has. So at least when it comes to preparing for whatever is next in the world, as the Chinese become more belligerent and as they start to fall apart, as the Ukraine were crescendos and we face the Russian demographic dissolution,

as the European alliance fractures because the depopulation there is making it very difficult for them to do anything else, else the most important single piece of our future was done by Donald Trump. And he deserves credit for that. And I don't think that whoever his successor is, Harris or J.D. Vance, is going to have the political authority or interest in overturning that. So, you know, hooray. Now, with that said, I have now probably thoroughly pissed off everybody on both sides. You should go vote.

And you should know that by the time you're seeing this video, I'm already out of the country. So have a good one.