The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - How to End American Power || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Trump's latest statement telling countries to secure their own oil dismantles the very fabric of the global order. We'd be stepping away from the post-WWII system where the U.S. provided security for everyone, so economic growth could be the priority. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4c4puXe

Hey all, Peter Zine here coming from Colorado. Today is the 31st of March and whewee. We're having some fun things on Donald Trump's Truth Social account. So the big news is that Trump has said NATO is pretty much finished and all of the countries that want crude from the Persian Gulf now need to come and get it themselves and just take it. If you read the line, which we'll print here, basically what he's asking for is a return to the colonial area when each individual country maintain its own independent military forces, especially naval forces, and in doing so looked after its own economic issues.

The reason we do things today, the way we have been for the last 75 years, is we know that that model guarantees interstate conflict. There's two big layers to it. The first is that if you maintain colonies, you're fighting to control those colonies. In the case of the Persian Gulf, this is actually probably one of the easier places to do it, because so much of the population is dependent upon physical infrastructure, like say, desalination. And so maintaining a degree of control is relatively manpower light versus the economic assets you get. You'll have to manage those populations.

You might have to move some of those population. You may have to kill a lot of those populations. But from a purely technical point of view, it's not too bad. The second problem is that everyone will have their own population. preferences as to where the resources go, i.e. home. So you are guaranteeing a degree of interstate conflict among the oil importers because they will all now need to have their own naval forces in order to secure shipments from point of production in the Persian Gulf to points of consumption, primarily back in Europe or East Asia. One of the things that really worked about globalization

is we basically told to everybody, you don't need a military anymore, because we will take care of that. So if you do maintain a military, it doesn't need to be big. And if there is a fight, we will defend you, and we will take full control of what military forces you do have. And what that did is it cleared the board. And every major power in world history, with the exception of Russia, was now for the first time on the same side under the NATO flag or the American flag, based on where you were. And the United States basically made all the security decisions. With very little debate, I might add. Moving away from that system to a situation where each individual power has their own military and is looking out for their own economic interests is going to take

us back to what we had roughly in 1930 when we were industrialized and so everyone realized they needed crude oil. But now with a whole new layer of technologies and things like drones, it's difficult to overstate how much of a title shift this is because American military power for the last 75 years has been based on the concept we're the sole decision-making or the sole arbiter and what we say goes. What Trump is now doing is deliberately forcing all of the allies to establish an independent military posture with independent military forces to look after their independent economic needs because he doesn't want to do it himself. Said so very, very explicitly.

In that world, we will have taken every major power in world history that still exists today and forced them to move away from the American umbrella and to set up their own independent system. And no matter what version the future holds, we are never going to see eye to eye with all of them in that sort of scenario. Part of what made globalization work, part of what the American Alliance system work, is we removed the military. side of the equation from their thinking so they could focus entirely on the economic. And if you want to undo that deal, that's, you know, there's a conversation to be had there. But abrogating in this way and basically forcing everybody to take up arms for their own economic issues, is turning the clock back to the weakest American security has ever been, and that's in the 1930s.

So the situation we have now is we're not simply guaranteeing more colonial conflicts. not simply guarantee more interstate conflicts. We're guaranteeing the fastest reduction in American strategic power in our lifetimes and arguably in the history of the Republic. Because while the U.S. military may be first and foremost in the world, especially when it comes to the Navy, deliberately ending the basing agreements, deliberately fostering, demanding competition, is going to land us in a world of hurt 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 50 years from now. And we're only now in the early second year of this administration.

There is a lot of time to make this truth social post, which Trump deeply believes is the right thing. There's a lot of time to make it stick. And if you look at what has happened in the last year with Donald Trump threatening invasion of NATO allies because he couldn't get a chunk of ice, I'm concerned that we're already well past the point of no return. And we're now in a situation where the U.S. military has to figure out how to close down. entire constellation of bases on a global basis, and start building contingency plans for fights with all of the countries that have been on our side for the last 75 years. At a minimum, best case scenario, none of those fights happen, but it still means a massive

reduction in the America's military global footprint and its ability to project power beyond the Western Hemisphere. So we are at the beginning of the greatest collapse in strategic power that I have seen in my life. The only similar situation that comes even remotely close would be the Soviet collapse at the end of the Cold War. But if you look at the Soviet Empire at that time, it was not nearly as global as what the United States has now. Most of their retreats were far closer to home, say the loss of Central Europe, for example. We're looking here at the United States becoming unwelcome, not just in the Middle East, but in Europe, and probably in East Asia, and we're actively pushing to create strategic competitors for a generation

or two from now. That is quite possibly the most fucking stupid thing that we could do, and yet here, here we are.