The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Assassination Attempt and A Changing World || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

On Saturday, July 13, there was an attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I'm not here to give you the play-by-play that you can get from the news, instead I want to put this incident into context of the broader political and economic shifts. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/assassination-attempt-and-a-changing-world

Everybody, Peter Zine, coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks. It is the 14th of July, and last night, Donald Trump was injured lightly in an assassination attempt. Now, I'm not going to give you a blow-by-blow of what went down because the details are still very sketchy. It looks like it was a 20-year-old registered Republican who's donated money to Democrats, which tells us absolutely nothing. The stupid surface, of course, will be doing their own investigation in leak with local law enforcement and the FBI, and we will wait for more details to see where that takes us. But I wanted to put this all into context. There's a lot of things going on in the world right now

that suggests we're going to be in a more politically volatile period. First big thing. America is going through its once-and-every-generation political rearrangement, something that Trump is part of. The Americans have a first-past-post single-member district political system, which means that you will vote for a single-part person who will then represent a very specific geography. You don't vote for a party. In doing this, American parties tend to be fairly weak, and so they tend to be coalitions of coalitions. So you get

multiple political factions that bandy together around a single tent in order to get one more vote than whoever comes in second. So today, for example, the Republican Party has traditionally been made out of People who are concerned with budget deficit, people who are concerned with national security, people are concerned about business regulation. You get social conservatives, that sort of thing. Well, as technology and demographics and economic patterns evolve, the factions make less sense. And so the factions rise and fall within the coalitions, and if things get stressed enough, they end up falling out of the coalition. altogether, maybe becoming swing voters, maybe go to the other side. What we're seeing right now is that in spades for the Republican coalition.

The business community and the national security community and the fiscal community have all been basically ejected from the party, but Donald Trump has been successful in drawing other groups away from the Democratic coalition. So, for example, union voters are no longer considered Democrats by their voting patterns, and Hispanics have shifted quite a bit. This is still very much a work in progress, and Donald Trump is benefiting from this as much as he is losing from this. But if you think about what's happened in the last 30, 40 years, we've had the rise of hyper-globalization and now it's fall. We've had the height of the baby boomers in the workforce and now the retirement.

Not exactly a shock to think that we are going to manage our political system differently. So that's the first big peaks. America politically is in movement. Second, the world economically is in movement. The whole point of the post-World War II global consensus was that the Americans will take care of the guns and keep everyone safe. The Americans will open their market and make the global seas safe for everyone's commerce if in exchange you side with the Americans and the Cold War. And that provided the basis for everything from the alliance with Taiwan, Korean, Japan to NATO. And that's created the world that we know.

It's also created the economic backdrop and the security backdrop that made the rise of China possible because during the Cold War, late Cold War, China, was one of those allies. Well, that whole system is breaking down. Two reasons. Number one, the Americans can't pay for it anymore and don't want to. The Americans refashioned their Navy, so instead of hundreds of ships they can patrol the oceans, they have a few clusters of ships that are really good for fighting wars.

So the ability of having that global coverage isn't there. And Americans politically are tired of paying the economic price of keeping the world open for everyone because it's put everybody else on advantage versus American workers. And that just doesn't fly in today's populist era. The second issue is that when you do economically develop, when you do industrialize,

you also urbanize. And after seven decades of urbanization, people are having fewer and fewer children around the world. Well, you do that for seven decades. It's not that you're running out of 10-year-olds and 20-year-olds, you're running out of 50-year-olds and increasingly 60-year-olds. And this decade, the 2020s, was always going to be the decade that a lot of countries slipped away from having a workforce that can support

the globalized system in the first place. After all, if you don't have consumption, you don't have trade. So this whole system, the American political network, is evolving and the global economic network is collapsing and reforming. What this all means is there's a lot of change out there in the way we live, the way we work, who we service with our businesses, where we get our goods. And when things change, people with a vested interest in the system don't always make it. And people get scared and people get angry. And that is when you get violence. We're going to get it to the state level with a series of military conflicts. The first of those is already happening in Ukraine. We'll probably get what in China before long.

And in the case of the United States, and queries of political change like this, that's when we get our domestic political and violence. It happened in the 1930s when we had the Great Depression in that political reorientation. It happened with reconstruction, and it happened with the Civil War. So I don't want to suggest that this is the beginning of more of the same.

I'm saying that the factors that define our world are evolving, and we're going to change with it. And for the United States overall, this is a net. gain in many, many ways, but going through the process of getting from where we've been and what we're comfortable with to where we're going in something that's unknown, unfortunately, is going to generate a lot of stresses along the way. And we saw some of that last night.